Why I Give a Rat's Ass - Or - A Post for Shannon

So.
I'm driving in my car. I'm sitting at my desk. I'm shampooing my hair, or, is it conditioning(?) and I'm trying to decide whether or not I should expend the time, energy and finances to spend more time at L'Abri, thinking about God and ideas and if any of it makes an ounce of difference. I wonder if all I actually need to know about God, I already know, and if all the rest is vanity, posing as sincerity.
And then, I remember sitting in my first year psychology course, almost ten years ago now, and learning how racism often develops - that we have an idea about something, like, say - Asians are bad drivers - and then every time we see a bad Asian driver we reinforce this belief. We ignore the good Asian drivers because they do not fit into our pre-conceived idea of Asian drivers. And soon, we firmly believe that all Asians are bad drivers, and we have the experience to prove it. Simple. Simple.

That idea of reinforcement of stereotypes changed the way I lived. Not because I was ever a racist, but because I was not aware of my own workings. When I learned how susceptible I could be to ignorant assumptions, I began catching myself making them, and in that awareness was able to change my actions, because of my knowledge. Blah, blah, blah. You know this. You are a teacher. I write it to show you how my brain works - that I am uninterested in questioning things, just for the hell of it. There's got to be some pay off, hey? I'm not a kid anymore.

So, I'm sitting in the car now, at my desk, in the shower -with soap in my eyes, thinking, "Okay, this is true. I live out my life based on what I believe. Really. There is no such thing as mental exercise, because if I really believe what I am learning, then either now, or in the future, this knowledge will determine how I live out this truth."
Okay.
Good.
Okay.
And then, I come across this bit in the Merton I'm reading about God's will being affected by my will, and there is no pretension of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, because I really want to think about it. I want to make that knowledge mine, about whether or not I touch God, whether or not she mutters and cleans up my messes, or bends herself around my mistakes in some glorious arch that I cannot comprehend but respects me as I am. All of a sudden, I see a new way of understanding how God loves me, and it excites me because it's so much bigger than I thought it was, and it makes me feel like saying, "Man! Why didn't anyone tell me this before! - Do you think this is true? Is this crazy? Is this sound? Look at me. Watch me go." And then, I feel a little bit more like God is walking alongside me, and that her damn check list (that I always worry about), is actually a grocery list, and not an account of all my mistakes, like I thought it might be.
And that, my friend, is why Scarlet, the rat's ass, Rhett Butler and I, give our unanimous damns.