For the thrill of the chase

I'm sipping a glass of Spanish red, listening to Of Monsters and Men, thinking about morality.

When I was in high school/ early college it was all about "living up" to the standards God has given to us in the Bible.  Things like abstaining from sex and not cussing and "managing your thought life" took precedence.  I hated myself during this time.  And often struggled with hating others who broke these obvious rules of God carelessly or deliberately.  Yes, it's true that I broke these rules on an hourly/minutely/secondly manner, but at least I felt BAD about it.

What a wasted effort.

It's hard for me to look back on that time of attempted moral superiority and self-sufficiency without thinking maybe I wasn't alone in this.  Are there others that were also hating themselves but trying to appear to others that they were simply striving after God?  These days, I still feel myself drawn into returning to some of those same judgments of myself and others according to this scale of "morality."  But now, I have come to believe that most common ideas of "morality" are anything but.

Most commonly something is considered "moral" if the society that is currently holding the power deems it normal or right.  Rarely is a thought given towards whether or not God approves, disproves, or cares.  Rather, it is ASSUMED that God approves or disapproves, and NEVER does God not have an opinion (sorry about all the negatives).

"If God knows every hair on your head like the scripture says, then of COURSE he believes that any and all forms of abortion are wrong."  "... of course he says that we should never kill our neighbor unless our government deems him/her an enemy of freedom and then we need to kill them"

I myself am in a bit of a moral dilemma.  I can't go into details but I have been scratching my head as to what God thinks of it.  It's the type of dilemma in which there is no single-phrase scripture that speaks to it.  I suppose I could infer a few things from a number of different biblical situations, but it's not simple like, "_____ should not _____, no matter what."  Julie and I spoke of this at length this evening without coming to any conclusions.

I guess it's good to just ask the question in the first place-- but will we ever come to an answer?  And if we know there is not going to be an official answer should we still keep asking the question?  Is that kinda like chasing your tail even though you know you'll never catch it and if you catch it what will you do with a damn tail in your mouth?

This is typically when I write a song.