The light that I’m sitting under right now makes me look really tan. I’ll be sitting here for the rest of my life. Come visit me.

Anyway, I thought it was time to take a trip down nostalgia avenue and do one of my classic “Here’s what happened and here’s how that concept applies to your life!” blogs. Here goes:

Josh and I went to Houston on Saturday. Our purpose was two fold: see Nanny and visit a Modern Art museum. One of the purposes was accomplished well, the other was a room full of rock and roll pictures (some of them were good but it’s not what I drove an hour and a half to see). Josh and I only got lost…everytime we got in the car to go somewhere else. We went to Herman park which is beautiful, even in winter. They have a Japanese garden and a Lincoln Memorial look alike.

We even went to the Galleria…after taking the scenic route of industrial Houston because we were (of course) lost. By the time we got parked in the silly garage, we were parched. So fruit smoothie time it is. The problem was that we couldn’t find the food court, which was near the ice skating rink. This little fiasco resulted in us getting lots of good exercise walking around and up and down and hemming and hawing AND in both of our decisions that Houston is simply too big for us. If we can’t navigate the mall, we can’t navigate the roads. Anyway, we finally found the food court and bought really expensive fruit smoothies. We found a bench overlooking the rink and the Zamboni driver that was on it. We drove one man away (simply because we sat next to him) but a black lady with a baby was brave enough to take the end of the bench. Well, Josh went to the bathroom and I wanted to stay and watch kids skate. Two of our bench partner’s male friends came out of a store. One stood behind me and the other to the side of the bench where Josh should have been sitting. They began conversing over my head. Awkward? Yes, please. Anyway, after the baby had walked in front of me to her dad and they finished their quite lovely conversation, they left and I was alone with the skaters and my strawberry banana goodness.

Upon observing the ice skaters, I observed two things. The first is that ice skating makes girls feel pretty. It didn’t matter what kind of body type or clothing the girl was wearing, once she got into the motion and stopped wobbling, she wore a peaceful smile and assumed ballerina like fingers. [Note: I do not feel pretty while ice skating. I feel like a giraffe, not because I have  long legs, but because of my extreme awkwardness of extremities]

My second observation was a little kid that had Harry Potter glasses on. Why did I pick him out of the hundred people on the rink? Because he busted on his face right in front of me. What shocked me was his reaction. If I busted on my face, I would probably lay there and willingly accept the agony of defeat. But this kid made the rock face sign, not unlike the sign that young John Lennon is making here:

“What an odd way to react to a fall.” I thought to myself. I watched him get up to apparently “try, try, again” but he stood up only to purposely stick his toe down in the ice and fall on his head again. Before he had even lost momentum, he immediately shot his eyes up to the peanut gallery to see if anyone had seen him. I was really in awe. I mean, I know that sometimes boys do dumb things like put themselves in imminent danger because it’s innate but this kid was falling for attention. Weird.

So this got me thinking, how many times have I done something bad just to get attention for it? It’s a weird question because the cry for attention is usually subconscious but think about it. I went to the Word and couldn’t find/ think of an example of someone who sinned just to draw attention to themeselves. But, I mean, essentially what we’re doing is sinning to glorify ourselves. That’s like double sin. So doing something wrong for attention is wrong. Period.

My next thought was how do we respond to people who do this (which means everyone at one time or another)?  My first thought: Put them in theater. While this helps, it is not a permanent solution. My next thought is how would Christ respond to that one person that gets on our nerves because they so desperately want our attention that they’ll go to any lengths to get it, even sin? My answer is this: Christ didn’t really waste anything. It seems that everything he did had a purpose. I think Christ would have put aside whatever he was doing and given said person all the good attention that they needed so that they wouldn’t need to seek that negative attention. Some people could talk for years, and I’m not saying that Christ would have listened to them for that long, per se, (actually he probably would have, he listens to me that long) but I think that he would have made an effort to teach them to let God satisfy that need for attention. Following Christ’s example, I think this really means loving people to death. Truly caring about what they’re saying, even if you can only listen for five minutes. Show that you’re listening. And when they purposely stick their toe in the ice and fall head first, then look to you for your reaction, you should hate what they have done but love them. It’s that whole concept. I think with these kind of attention-grabbing sins, they stop once they know that they can get your attention through other ways, like you voluntarily giving it.

If we could learn how to teach people to let God satisfy their needs, especially the need for attention and love, then it could be revolutionary.