For a few days now I’ve had the line “finding who i am” as my MSN tagline, and not very few people were curious about what it meant (relatively speaking, many, since how often do people ask about your MSN name?)
Back in high school during one youth group meeting, Andrew Wong, an older student who had gone off to Moody Bible Institute (and is now a pastor in Toronto), returned and shared a short talk on what he learned about preparing yourself to date. I remember he said that the world normally suggests that you find ‘that perfect someone’. But what Christians really need to do is to prepare yourself to be ‘that perfect someone’. He had some other points too, but I don’t remember those ones very well now. After 5 years, I think I understand what he means.
If I want to treat my future wife properly, I’ll need to begin by treating myself properly. Because even if in the first few years I’ll treat her nice, eventually things will become more comfortable and normal, in all honesty. So the way I behave when alone and by myself will be the way I conduct myself after many years with another person. Another message I heard once was: “Love one another as yourself. But do we even love ourselves?” The world has turned into a place where people hate themselves, are ashamed of themselves, or wished they were someone else. If that’s not the case with you or me, it’s very possible that we don’t know how to love ourselves properly, still.
Here are some questions I wrote down in my journal to ask myself this week:
“What do I do when I am alone? This demonstrates how I treat other people in personal situations.
Do I let things slide and become messy?
Do I give my body junk?
Do I waste my time?
Do I settle for second best?
Do I manage my money wisely?
Am I comfortable with who I am and how I look or how I act?
Am I being honest with myself?”
For instance, washing the dishes needs to be done everyday. When, in the future, I may have a family, I won’t desire to wash the dishes more than I do now, but it will still need to be done. So I can practise now to love myself by keeping the kitchen, or my room, or the house, clean, so that in the future I’ll understand how to love my family by keeping the home in the same clean state.
Of course I’m still living on my own and that affords the freedom of when to or not to exercise these disciplines. Right now, as all my housemates are gone, and I’m the only one here, I can choose to be disciplined and I’ll know that my cleanliness has a direct effect on my living conditions — I have no excuse that things aren’t clean as a result of someone else’s mess.
How I spend my time is also an indicator of discipline. I’ve disconnected the television and that takes away the temptation of wasting time and viewing inappropriate content when unmonitored by my housemates. That leaves lots of time to do other productive things. In the past few days I’ve completed many tasks that needed to be done for a long time now. As the week has continued, it’s been more difficult to keep myself occupied with meaningful things, but reading books, updating my website design, and cooking nice meals aren’t meaningless things, nonetheless.
I took the guitar out and jammed a bit with Liz and another friend from Elora Road named Kyle. It was pretty exhausting, for some reason, playing songs for about an hour and a half. Quite unfortunate that I wasn’t able to play the grand piano in the sanctuary, however, since the elementary school kids were in there practising for the Christmas Pageant. Then I spent the rest of the night making dinner, processing my own film and printing the photos at Black’s (they turned out really well, a whole roll of good pictures!), and video editing at New House.
Did you know that it takes a long time to do video editing? 2 minutes worth of video for the Rocky Mountain Project party at Winter Conference took me 4 hours. From about 8pm till midnight. Craziness. But the time went by really fast. Hadn’t done video editing for a long time, probably since Summit in October.