Raised from the dead with Christ, sin nature cut away. Is he describing me right now? Cause I'm not sure about that.

Okay, that last one was a trick to make you think I wasn't going to write another novel. But here it is. "reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ, 3 in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." I love that. God's knowledge is a mystery, and while Christ may hold all the hidden treasures, it's definitely a journey and an adventure getting there. But I take peace in the fact that I don't need to know it all. I think the goal is to consider those discovered treasures the riches they are. I also thought about the judgment thing from my post yesterday and realized how wrong I was. We have to judge. We can't help but judge. I concluded what's more important is what we do with those judgments. In some cases its probably very wise to judge, say your kids friends. However, there is a lot of potential wisdom or folly in how you deal with the situation. I'm not really sure the correct answer, but just saying. We all have planks in our eye, but sometimes it seems kind of obvious when someone has a plank in theirs. So what do we do? Can you tell your friends parents, I think you have lackluster parenting skills, your child is unruly and teaching my kid to be unruly too? That clearly doesn't seem like it would represent Christ in a good way. I'm not a perfect parent either, so who am I to judge. But I am a parent looking out for my kid. Maybe that example seems too stacked. But I run into the same issues all over the place, for example, judging an employee. That's something I have to do every day and, well, I certainly have plenty of to work on as an employer, so I'm not perfect, but I still have to judge. In church, we judge our pastors and consider it a wise thing to do. A pastor is not perfect, but he has to judge his staff. I guess it just boils down to your outlook. Gotta give people grace, gotta love them, and understand God loves them just as much as he loves you, cares about their lives just as much, even if its the unruly family in your 1st graders class. Tricky stuff.