“Nothing has changed.”

I wasn’t so sure. It seemed to me that everything had changed. With four words – “your cancer is malignant” – his parents would lose their oldest son, his wife would become a widow, his four children, way too young to lose a father, would, indeed, lose their father, and what about me? Not that it’s all about me, but I would lose a dear friend in just a little more than a year. The cancer was inoperable and there were no viable treatments. But those were his first words to me. He said them about twenty-five minutes after he was given his diagnosis and prognosis. “Nothing has changed.”

I suspect the newlyweds were surprised by my zeal. “So… what did you learn?! How can we (my wife and I) grow in intimacy?!”

They had been to an intimacy conference – I assumed it focused on marriage – and I couldn’t resist asking a few questions. I was probably a little too enthusiastic because they had only been married four months. They weren’t accustomed to being accosted with personal questions, and the fact that I hardly knew them probably didn’t help, but who can resist the opportunity to get a little intimacy advice?

“Do you think homosexuality is disgusting?”

The question could not have been asked in a more gracious manner. Here is the context. The person who asked me had heard a taped lecture of mine on homosexuality, and it was the lecture that caused him to ask the question. My . . . own . . . lecture. Talk about a question that went to the heart. I was undone by it. Still am – in a good way. Everyone should be so blessed as to have someone like him speak into your life.

Strong emotions always insist on particular interpretations of life, and they are in no mood to listen to alternatives.

“It is vain to contend with anything that hath the power of our affections at its disposal; it will prevail at the last.” So says Jonathan Edwards in Treatise on Religious Affections, and he is right. When you feel something strongly, you are very confident in whatever that emotion says about you, other people and God.

An old priest was asked at his retirement, “What have you learned after having heard so many confessions?”

“I have learned that people are more miserable and less good than I once thought.”

The part about the “less good” – I understand why he said that. He was hearing confessions after all. My own experience, however, is a little different. I have found that people are both less good and more good than I once thought. As a counselor who has the privilege of knowing the details of people’s lives, I would say that I am most surprised by the more good. The Spirit of God really is with people.

With so much of life being untidy and imperfect, I appreciate an epilogue that brings a satisfying completeness to a complicated story. I’ll even settle for a couple of lines at the end of a movie: Jack’s fortunes were restored, his good name was cleared, and he lived to see many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, which sounds peculiarly like a great Old Testament epilogue. Yes, the end of Job is a winner, but, as we might expect, everything is better once Jesus comes. The epilogue to John’s gospel is the best ever.

There has been a run on blame-sharing recently. Keep an eye out for it. Blame-sharing is the viral mutation of blame-shifting, and it is deadly. Honest, it is deadly.