Update

It’s been an interesting weekend.

I went tubing on the Comal yesterday. I’ve wanted to go again since May. I invited three other people, but only one (Gina) was interested. We had a very nice time. Either because of the game or the weather (it was a touch cool) very few people were on the river.

One thing we talked about was the entry I wrote a couple of months back, in which I confessed my frustration with my painful lack of social skills. I can’t remember if I mentioned then that it wasn’t the first such entry I’ve written. I’ve just always been too embarrassed to post them publicly. But, since that time, I’ve felt quite a bit better about the whole thing.

Gina started when I said that, and I asked her why she was so surprised. She said that it reminded her of Paul’s instruction to us to confess our sins to one another. Once we work up the courage to get everything out in the open, we don’t have anything else left to hide. We don’t have to be ashamed anymore, at least not in quite the same way. It turns out that calling it a confession wasn’t far off the mark.

We had a lot of other worthwhile conversations, too. A very nice day, indeed.

This morning, I met with an elder to take another step towards becoming a member of the church I’ve been attending for the past year. Talking to him as well as dwelling on something Gina and I talked about yesterday has made me realize how little I think of God. Most of the “spiritual” things I do are completely selfish. They are aimed at increasing my comfort, sense of sublimity and purpose, and so forth. God is present mostly for the purposes of intellectual consistency, like carrying the two, rather than as a person.