being complete

Do I 'love' my friends to serve my own emotional needs? Do I just hang out with them because I feel loved or accpeted or do I hang out as much as I do because they are good people? Don't mistake me, all my friends are good people. The question is, do I hang out with them because I sense that, or because I need to feel apart of a family. I want to love people with no selfish ambition or vain conceit, considering others better than myself. (Phil 2:3). I don't want to be this selfish poser who seeks the head of the table or the warm fuzzy feelings but whom Christ must tell to get up so a person of greater honour can sit down (from one of His parables somewhere) I hang out with such luminaries, great men and women all of them, but do I really value them or do I value what they can give me?

I don't know what provoked me to beat up on myself like that. I guess I want to be an open book. I want no one to say Daniel Allegri did not struggle or hurt or need God (or rejoice or dance or sing too- my life is not all gloom!) every minute of every day. But I need Him, I need Him to be the person He wants, the fufill the master's design scheme, to be a proper minister. I need HIM so badly. The completed Christian realizes that to be completed you need God every minute and that you will never realize the depth of how much you need Him and thus, in the trenches of earthness in which we live, will never be truly completed.

That's the message of heaven, being complete. In the last paragraph, I was tempted to write complete instead of sucessful, but to not be sucessful dredges up a whole bunch of issues like failure and rejection that God is NEVER about. We are never whole but we are completly His and He has won the day. God on earth is kind of like apple juice; the more you drink the thirstier you become. God in Heaven is like living and vital water; He totally doesn't just quench our thirst to be inflamed later, he satisfies it once and for all--- we never thirst again.

Maybe that's why I need people, to be the rivers of God to quench my soul. That theory still has a gramme of self-interest in it but is a whole lot more honest.

totally not what I was about to talk about.
pax Christi vobiscum