#EUTM

is an acronym for a phrase coined by the new football coach at my alma mater (university of michigan), a guy named jim harbaugh. the phrase is Enthusiasm Unknown To Mankind, used to describe how we should attack that day's tasks and goals. PUIGA - procrastination until it goes away is more my speed.  i'm going to segue away from this for a bit, but it does all tie together, though the web is still tenuous in my mind, as i type this.

during the press conference announcing his hire, JH said something that floats through my mind at various times throughout the day: "...you don't compare great to great, because something gets diminished...". we are diminished both by the act of comparison as well as by the result. and the more i dwell on this, the more truth i mine out of this nugget. a lot of the baggage we carry comes out of making comparisons. in fact, i suspect that this is a fundamental component of shame - which i'll define now as a sense of inferiority that comes from falling short in a comparison to an inappropriate standard - which is not the same as an impossible standard, as scripture says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god.

maybe this is my version of einstein's unified field theory - i see glimpses of it all tying together but verbalizing it coherently escapes me at the moment.

we have been redeemed, and ideally, are continually in a process of being transformed more & more into the image of christ. but what does that really mean? it's somewhere in there that i suspect we all get hung up somehow. it seems to me that we glorify god in our uniqueness, but that distinction has been lost. for me, i carry the experience that my uniqueness and perspectives i've developed along the way (healthy or otherwise) separates me from most. my expectation is that i have to endure the consequences of my own provincialism yet be the one who has to make the sacrifices to accommodate the provincialism of others, and that's left me angry and jaded. and yet i still impose expectations of my own - based on my own interpretation of how things should be.

this also seems to tie into another major component of the unified field theory - what we learn to believe about god is related to knowing god for who he really is. in the story of jesus and the rich man, the first thing jesus does in that exchange is clarify something about god himself. and we struggle with the duality of god's goodness and god's holiness. in an ideal world, we as children get to see that personified in two loving but different parents - the mother who loves unconditionally and the father who loves but also disciplines to establish right and wrong. this hypothesis is supported by empirical evidence that people tend to view god the way they view the parent of the opposite sex. and this is clearly true in my own relationship with god.

more on this.