An Important Challenge

Soon to come (as soon as I have them, I guess :P) are pictures from grad, and pictures from bug-ageddon, which Matt and I participated in with my parents. For now, I wanted to share from a great post that I read on Seraphic Singles. This is a blog that I enjoy very much even though I am not single, and I am not Catholic! There are usually great nuggets of truth and pearls of wisdom in the advice she posts for readers who write in (mostly single Nice Catholic Girls), and there are also many posts of just good thinking. I am hoping to buy her book soon, especially if Crux will take my gift certificate from three Christmases ago that was lost but is now found. But I digress.

Yesterday's post was a very worthwhile read (as was Monday's: On Chasing Lazy-Ass Men!), and a very good reminder of a cultural landmine we often ignore, so I wanted to share the reminder. Here is an excerpt, although the full post is well worth your time. The context is a reader who may or may not have contracted herpes from her boyfriend who just told her he had it. Seraphic says,

It shouldn't take an incurable disease to make a woman see that the man who won't commit to her but still hangs around is clear and present danger to her happiness. Sometimes, however, it does.
The sickness of our age is that we privilege the will over the intellect. We prefer to think the world is what we want it to be, not what it is. Perhaps the most extreme and visible example of this is the man who has his genitals surgically removed, swallows umpteen hormones, dons huge high-heel shoes and tells everyone around that he is now a woman. Thanks to the sickness of the age, some governments and societies choose to humour him. It is unlikely that they will be woken up by some child shouting "The Empress has no vagina!"

If you don't have time to read the full post (because I think it's very obvious in the full context), know that this is not a rant about transvestites or others who are sexually confused. It is about the LIE our culture has bought into that reality is ours to shape into hopes and dreams and desires rather than something concrete that frames our existence within which we have free will. I have no doubt that this contributes much to the sexual confusion and perversion that abounds in our culture, but that is fruit, not the root of the problem, and the root of the problem equally affects everybody: married people, single people, successful people, desperately unhappy people. The problem is believing lies that we want to believe instead of facing difficult truth.

This post was timely for me because I was getting caught up and distracted by some what-ifs. I knew they weren't worth thinking about, but I let them rattle around in my head anyways because I wasn't sure what else to do. It's not easy to banish rogue thoughts, but happiness and sanity rely on being present in REAL LIFE. My circumstances aren't permanent, but they are what they are for now, and I don't want to waste all of the goodness I have on fantasizing about if things were different. So I hope this is encouraging for you too! Seize the goodness!!