So that I want to SCREAM

Anger is my achilles heel, my greatest weakness. Yeah, I don't hold grudges with people after I'm angry with them, but my anger burns bright and hot while I'm in the midst of a fiery passion.

How do I live with that? I get so angry that I yell and say hurtful things that I regret later. It takes a pretty good amount to fan my anger up into top-notch heat, but once it's there, It's hard to get rid of until I've done something completely stupid.

It wasn't until this week that I really learned how much of a weakness this is for me. It's like a cobra, hiding under my skin and striking when I least expect it, and the strike is so fast that I don't really realize what happened.

Why did the revelation come? I did something horrible out of anger this week, something I didn't think I could do, and it scared me. I scared myself, the night after I did the thing. I apologized, and I meant it; but the potential that I could do something that bad? Yeah, it was there.

When I went to confession this past Saturday, I was shaking in my boots with fear. I've heard that it takes courage to confess your sins, but I hadn't felt the need for that courage until recently. I felt ashamed of myself; ashamed to tell our parish priest of how horrible I had been.

Know what's strange, though? Men are not ashamed at all to sin and do the WRONG thing, but when they are faced with doing the right thing that is looked on as honorable, they are stricken with complete shame and embarrassment. I read that in a book, and it makes sense. Figure that one out, it's so strange and backwards.

It was this quote from the book I read that kept me going, strangely enough, and I made it into confession and confessed my sins. The best thing was, God came through. You know, He promises to do that, and I say I believe Him, but most of the time I'm trusting blindly and hoping that it'll remain true this time-- not really knowing. Each time He does come through, it makes me glad that I took the step of faith and trusted.

I feel so much more clean now. I do understand why Protestants think it'd be weird to confess your sins to someone else, but mostly I think that's because of shame. In going to confession, I'm not letting that hold me down. In 1 Peter, Peter told the early Christians to confess their sins to one another. I'm doing that, and you know what? I learned this week that it can be REALLY scary. Then and again, I learned that It's so GOOD as well.

Cause I didn't tell you that it lifted a huge burden off my soul to know that right there, right then, God forgave me. He wiped my soul clean and incinerated the cloth He wiped it with.

As for my anger, I'm not exactly sure what to do with it. I want to scream about it sometimes, I'm so frustrated; but I'm taking it to God in prayer. He'll know what to do. I'll try to calm down, to breathe, to love others like God would-- and your prayers would be wonderful as well.

Love you all!

-Tina

All things in moderation?

Temperance is a funny thing. I've been working at balance in my life, and I seem to suffer from having too much of one thing and not enough of others. For example, I spend a whole lotta time on a really great site called NarniaWeb. The site is amazing. The five hours I spend there instead of doing other things is not.

I do love to do useful things. I know that sounds incredibly boring, but bear with me. I love the feeling at the end of the day when you look back and see that you really helped your mom with the housework, or finished some bit of schoolwork, or got writing done (if you're a writer, like me). That feeling is just one of satisfaction. For me, I go: "I actually didn't waste my day today! I did stuff that mattered, that change the way I'll be living tomorrow and in the future!" I don't exactly think like that, but that's the feeling in words.

Unfortunately, one of the reasons that the feeling is special right now is because it doesn't happen all the time. One of my goals lately has been to live each day well. Not okay, not acceptable. Just really well. It's really hard. I do too much of stupid stuff and not enough of the important stuff. Sometimes I really fall flat on my face and then I think at night, before I go to bed, "What in the world was I thinking? I was an idiot!"

To go off on another tangent from the title, I wanted to talk about movie content. I want to be a screenwriter, like I've said before in other posts, and I've been thinking a lot about my mission in that and just movies in general.

I have kind of really high standards for movies. My sisters don't share many of my opinions. The sister just above me, in particular, asks me to watch movies a lot and I'll look up the movies online to see what the lowdown is, especially on pluggedin.com. Mostly, I'll decide against watching the movie because it looks like it has a lot of vulgarity in it. My sister makes the case that, if I want to be a screenwriter, I have to watch all kinds of movies, not just the ones I think I'll think.

This is a bit of an issue for me. I don't agree with her completely. I mean, I can see that watching movies and listening to scripts can help you understand how to write them, but what if this movie is very lewd? What if the mindset of the characters towards pre-marital sex is very casual?

I don't know about you guys, but I have a very difficult time with sexuality in movies. It's a very big occasion of sin for me, and I know it. So do I go in to watch the movie, knowing what's there and knowing that it could lead me into sin? My stance is NO. I may not have watched the movie before, but if I know there's crap scattered all through the movie, I'm not gonna see it.

What do you all think, I wonder?

-Tina