of sushi and sunrises

Today was a good day. I worked an easy morning shift and was out by 1:00. I went to Caesar's Creek and found a place down on the lake and read 2 Peter for a while. I returned home and passed out and woke up when Dylan and Tyler came over. We grabbed sushi for dinner and then relaxed at Starbucks in the beautiful June weather, and then we went back to my place to play some Wii. This week is looking pretty good. I work an array of random shifts (definitely not the normal morning hours; e.g. I am working 12-8:30 tomorrow), and Saturday I am going to a house warming party down in Cincinnati and Sunday I am getting China Cottage for lunch after going to M.C.C. with Pat Dewenter. Oh: I went kayaking the other day and really enjoyed it, I'm trying to find a place around here where I can go kayaking for a couple hours without dishing out loads of money. Below is a picture I took out on the lake today:

I told my friend Mandy, "I'm a very insensitive person. It's because of my pride." As the old song goes, "I'm filthy with my sin, and I carry pride like a disease." Pride is one of the most common--and one of the most fatal--sins. Everyone deals with it, even the ones who loathe themselves the most. The transition is from placing one's pride in oneself and placing pride in God. This isn't something that happens overnight, and though there are aspects of my existence in which I do take my pride in God, there are far more where I take my pride in myself. One of these is the pride of knowledge. Ever since high school I have been in love with knowledge. I have sought to understand things from various angles and to get to the root and meat of even the most surface-level ideas. I am gifted at understanding abstract concepts and ideas and their interrelations with one another. When faced with what I perceive to be foolish and stupid ideas, I am quite quick to judge, somehow perceiving that those who hold such views are unintelligent. This is not the case. Some are quite intelligent, even if that intelligence is way off-base. And the views we hold we do not hold simply because we have studied them; our perspectives of things are due much less to any sort of academic intelligence than to the accumulation of events and experiences in our lives and how we have interpreted them and continue to interpret them in an evolutionary dance. Anyways. Bottom-line: I need to be more humble (or at least act like it) when dealing with people who are not designed the way I am, i.e. people who do not have a desire to search things out to the bottom of the barrel.