The following post is an excerpt from a book by my friend Shelby Abbott. He's funny, entertaining and has deep thoughts about life, spirituality and movies. I look forward to going to the movies with him later this spring, as has become our tradition when we're hanging out together. Shelby's book is called I'm Awkward, You're Awkward. Enjoy this excerpt!
Glitter might
be one of the worst inventions ever created by man. You might think that I’m
joking, but I’m as serious about this as Darth Vader was about turning Luke to
the dark side in The Empire Strikes Back.
If I ever run
for office, the bedrock of my campaign strategy won’t be to balance the budget
or fix the health care crisis. It will be the push for complete and total
annihilation of the glitter department in the American greeting card industry.
Everybody’s
got their one ultimate archenemy: Superman has Lex Luthor, the Red Sox have the
Yankees, the democrats have Rush Limbaugh, Chuck Klosterman has Coldplay, and I
have glitter. I once heard a comedian say that glitter was “the herpes virus of
the crafting world…it just spreads everywhere.” I couldn’t agree more.
Three years
ago, I got a birthday card in the mail that had glitter on it and when I opened
it, it was like a New Year’s Eve party exploded all over my living room. There
was glitter everywhere. Glitter on
the carpet, glitter between the couch cushions, glitter on my shoes, glitter in
my hair, glitter on my pillow…I was finding glitter scattered around every part
of my life for months after I opened that despicable Hallmark birthday wish.
No joke: three
weeks went by after I thought that I had finally gotten rid of it all, and I
found a speck of glitter in a fresh pair of underpants when I was folding the
laundry. Time froze as I held that contaminated pair of boxer shorts and I
imagined a movie camera, rigged to a boom operator, zooming in close to my face
and whirling around my entire body while slowly moving up toward the ceiling. I
closed my eyes, extended both fists to the air (one clenching the underwear, of
course) and let out a prolonged and dramatic, “Nooooooo!” Needless to say, I
now let my wife open any and every greeting card that comes into our home. And
if one happens to be infected with glitter, she is immediately forced to throw
it in the trashcan and wash her hands in the basement utility sink not once,
not twice, but thrice times. I think you’re hearing what I’m saying by now,
right?
Although my
disdain for glitter runs strong through my veins, there are a number of other
things in this world that also cause me to grumble a bit. I’m a sinful pessimist
by nature and things like traffic, crooked window shades, pieces of white fuzz
on a black shirt, anything with Bill Maher’s name attached to it, the Greyhound
bussing system, and men’s swim trunks with the sewn-in mesh tighty-whitey
underwear all rub me the wrong way…sometimes literally. Yet another prime
example of a certain something that I dislike (but still want to mention) would
be the website, WebMD.
The good
people over at WebMD, bless their hearts, have caused a significant amount of
distress in my life over the last few years. I know that this is not their
intention, of course, but the best intentions of a public medical website
really have nothing to do with the fact that I constantly misdiagnose all of my
illnesses based upon what information is spit out to me once I type a few of my
problems into the “symptom checker”. There have been one too many times that
I’ve run across the worst case scenario in that little online feature…like the
time I thought I had kidney stones.
I woke up one
morning with this pain in my side, right below my rib cage. It really didn’t
matter which way I turned or positioned myself, the pain was pretty constant
and moderately irritating. After nearly two whole days of living with this
annoyance, I did what any internet-educated individual would do in my
position—I submitted my symptoms online to WebMD and briefly waited to see the
computerized list of my medical diagnoses. Well, at the top of the pile, there
it was: “kidney stones”. I freaked.
After Googling
my medical discovery, I quickly learned that passing a kidney stone was the
male pain equivalent to giving birth. The stone passed one way and one way
only, and that was by peeing it out in a long, slow, excruciating process. I
freaked again and called to make an appointment with a doctor.
After
sheepishly communicating my symptoms to the physician and a hasty look-see
process by her on the horribly uncomfortable examination room recliner with the
endless roll of disposable butcher paper, she told me that I, in fact, did not
have kidney stones, but a small pulled muscle in my lower abdomen. She briskly
gave me an unsympathetic look and a prescription for ibuprofen.
When I got
home that day after my appointment, I couldn’t help but think about the fact
that I am so incredibly quick to put my faith in the most negative of all
outcomes. I’ll believe the worst before I even come close to believing the best
in any given situation that might require my faith. Do you sometimes find
yourself in the same boat as me?
Prussian
orphanage director and missionary George Mueller once said, “The beginning of anxiety is the end of
faith and the beginning of true faith is the end of anxiety.”
If I want to
be a person of faith, then anxiety, worry, fear, and mistrust need to become a
thing of the past for me. Mueller says that anxiety and faith cannot coexist at
the same time, so when my instantaneous reaction to any little problem is a
belief in the worst, I am not being a man of faith.
This is not
the kind of life I want to continually live and it is certainly not the life
that God calls us to as His followers.
He is asking us to be men and women of faith and to believe that even in
the midst of the worst situations, He lovingly reigns over the entire universe
with complete sovereignty.
I shouldn’t be
so quick to believe the worst, and neither should you. Instead, I should
position myself as a humble and faithful child of God that believes in His
goodness and grace. As I do, my life will inevitably look different to any onlooker
that wrestles with the same issues. And after that, opportunities naturally
arise to speak with others about the God that has changed me to my core and
offers me the opportunity to live in peace instead of turmoil.
All that being
said, I wonder if that kind of faith can make me believe the best about the
person or persons that invented glitter? My guess would be “no."
by Ian Frazier.
by Wm. Paul Young. I should, honestly, be done with it by now, but I got a little distracted with writing my own book this week. When I'm in the middle of a project one of my "disciplines" is to only work on my own novel, and not read anything else for fun. The theory is, if I'm not having enough fun writing my own book, then maybe it's not good enough.
and probably one of the friendliest, kindest, most generous people I know. This is possibly because he was born in Canada, but nevertheless, I love the guy.
