Wisdom can come from the strangest places, in the oddest of circumstances. I recently received a little nugget of wisdom from the bag of haircare products I received after a haircut.
It doesn't really matter where the wisdom comes from, though, as long as it's sound, right? That's what I think, anyway. If it's good; apply it.
Here's what the back of the bag said:
It doesn't really matter where the wisdom comes from, though, as long as it's sound, right? That's what I think, anyway. If it's good; apply it.
Here's what the back of the bag said:
Don't be rigid. Everything can be the opposite of everything.
I was standing on the platform waiting to catch the metro and skirt off to meet my husband in town for our first lunch date post having children. The wind was blowing lightly, tufts of sand lifting into the air, blown all the way up from the Sahara, coating the entire country in a surreal, mysterious beige blanket of grit. It's getting everywhere: this misplaced sand. It's covering cars, causing asthmatic people breathing problems. Getting in your hair and settling.
That's actually what I was doing. Rubbing debris off my shirt when I looked down and noticed the big bold letters on the side of the bag. Shampoo bottle wisdom is still wisdom and I'd say that's some of the best damn wisdom I've gotten in a long time.
In my day job, I'm a social media manager for a few companies and businesses. So I spend a good deal of time creating content for people to pin, tweet, stumble or +1. Social media is brilliant because it connects people, but it's secretly a black hole, sucking everyone in. Social media can be the biggest affront to who we are. No one posts pictures or status messages when they're sad. Well, they might do, but nothing like the amount that gets posted as soon as something good happens. It creates a skewed view. It encourages us to judge one another, to troll through profiles of smiling faces and good times and to foster jealousy. It makes it too easy for people to grow discontent with their own lives and envious of others'. Whether anyone wants to admit it, we all do it. It's kind of one of the defaults of social media. And good social media managers know that and capitalize on that. (That's how we get you to do our work for us and sell our products so we don't have to ask employers for a bigger advertising budget.) But that's another story for a different sort of blog.
That social media tendency to compare leeches into religion. Those Christians who can't swallow without praising God? The ones who seem incapable of doing anything at all on their own, who have to evoke God's help from the big things to the little things, the ones who might seem annoying but who actually have a grasp on what Christianity is, they're my social media envy.
The people who are like Energizer bunnies for Christ, the ones who just keep going and going and going and going and shouting and lifting Him up? They're the people I want to be. That's the relationship I want to have with God. The purely submissive, conventional, easy relationship. That unquestioning, unwavering, undoubting blind devotion. So when I read those words on that bag, that was the first thing I thought of.
But just as the tram pulled up, its yellow painted doors parting to let passengers off and to let me on, God whispered something through the voice of a woman talking too loudly on her phone. "It's all possible," she said to the device plastered on the side of her head. I stopped listening after that. All the proverbial light bulbs went off: I'm not where I want to be in a lot of ways and in a lot of aspects of my life, but getting to those places is all possible.
Where I am is the opposite of where I want to be. If I'm not rigid, I'll get there. It's all possible, she said. And it truly is.
I was standing on the platform waiting to catch the metro and skirt off to meet my husband in town for our first lunch date post having children. The wind was blowing lightly, tufts of sand lifting into the air, blown all the way up from the Sahara, coating the entire country in a surreal, mysterious beige blanket of grit. It's getting everywhere: this misplaced sand. It's covering cars, causing asthmatic people breathing problems. Getting in your hair and settling.
That's actually what I was doing. Rubbing debris off my shirt when I looked down and noticed the big bold letters on the side of the bag. Shampoo bottle wisdom is still wisdom and I'd say that's some of the best damn wisdom I've gotten in a long time.
In my day job, I'm a social media manager for a few companies and businesses. So I spend a good deal of time creating content for people to pin, tweet, stumble or +1. Social media is brilliant because it connects people, but it's secretly a black hole, sucking everyone in. Social media can be the biggest affront to who we are. No one posts pictures or status messages when they're sad. Well, they might do, but nothing like the amount that gets posted as soon as something good happens. It creates a skewed view. It encourages us to judge one another, to troll through profiles of smiling faces and good times and to foster jealousy. It makes it too easy for people to grow discontent with their own lives and envious of others'. Whether anyone wants to admit it, we all do it. It's kind of one of the defaults of social media. And good social media managers know that and capitalize on that. (That's how we get you to do our work for us and sell our products so we don't have to ask employers for a bigger advertising budget.) But that's another story for a different sort of blog.
That social media tendency to compare leeches into religion. Those Christians who can't swallow without praising God? The ones who seem incapable of doing anything at all on their own, who have to evoke God's help from the big things to the little things, the ones who might seem annoying but who actually have a grasp on what Christianity is, they're my social media envy.
The people who are like Energizer bunnies for Christ, the ones who just keep going and going and going and going and shouting and lifting Him up? They're the people I want to be. That's the relationship I want to have with God. The purely submissive, conventional, easy relationship. That unquestioning, unwavering, undoubting blind devotion. So when I read those words on that bag, that was the first thing I thought of.
But just as the tram pulled up, its yellow painted doors parting to let passengers off and to let me on, God whispered something through the voice of a woman talking too loudly on her phone. "It's all possible," she said to the device plastered on the side of her head. I stopped listening after that. All the proverbial light bulbs went off: I'm not where I want to be in a lot of ways and in a lot of aspects of my life, but getting to those places is all possible.
Where I am is the opposite of where I want to be. If I'm not rigid, I'll get there. It's all possible, she said. And it truly is.