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Day’s Verse:
For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all … Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
1 Cor. 9:19, 10:31
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Do you ever feel like life is out to get you?

…No? That’s good, because in all honesty nobody’s out to get you at all. Your boss doesn’t hate you, your professors don’t scorn you, your friends don’t plot behind your back (too much). Your landlord neglects you equally with all the other tenants. The forces of nature don’t conspire to ruin your every waking moment and the night’s dark minions don’t seek your dreams to haunt. God has not marked you, like Job, for a lifetime of outrageous suffering and Satan gloats no more over your misery than the other seven billion peoples’. Your car (probably) does not go out of its way to cost you $500 in repairs every two weeks. Your body stores fat no more hideously than your neighbor’s body and your hair looks no more disgruntled than the general population. In fact, and here’s the revelation, your life is perfectly normal (within certain standard deviations), and in fact you live a darn cushy one. So chill out, refocus, and remember: do something every day to scare the person you’re stalking.

Just a friendly reminder from your fed-up, tired-out complaint sponge. Like a sponge, a person must become complaint-saturated from hearing so many minor dissatisfactions voiced, until finally no more will go in. If I haven’t reached that point, it’s coming soon. …Or maybe a better analogy would be a complaint mirror, in which people constantly gaze to see their complaint echoed back to them in sympathetic words and understanding murmurs. Is this the right way to listen to coworkers’ annoyances? To just absorb or reflect? Surely there must be another more positive way to deal with them.