I’ve changed living spaces. I have a bit more room, but less for the drawers that actually held my clothing. So, I went searching for another solution to clothing storage that wouldn’t take up precious floor space.

That’s when I remembered a friend who ditched his drawers and started keeping his clothing on a book shelf. It makes perfect sense. It’s the way we look through clothes in a store. Everything can be seen at a glance. Everything is accessible, and there’s no danger in overstuffing the drawers. Plus, shelves are easily enclosed in a closet, meaning you get more of your space back.

I say we go ahead and retire the chest of drawers. What advantages do they really even have? None, that I can think of.

By now you’ve probably heard BoB song Airplanes featuring Eminem and that girl that other people seem to know but I remain in the dark about. It came on yesterday while I was shuffling music on the way to an appointment. It occurred to me that it’s actually a fairly unique song, conceptually.

All of the verses focus on looking backwards in the past. But where most songwriting and art looks at current failures and searches the past for different choices that might have led to success, this one does just the opposite. It looks at the current success and wonders what little things might have been different to lead to an entirely different life.

I thought that was pretty cool.

This is Eminem’s verse which, besides stealing the show from BoB, also happens to illustrate what I’m talking about most clearly:

alright lets pretend Marshall Mathers never picked up a pen
lets pretend things would have been no different
pretend he procrastinated had no motivation
pretend he just made excuses that were so paper thin they could blow away with the wind
Marshall you’re never gonna make it makes no sense to play the game there ain’t no way that you’ll win
pretend he just stayed outside all day and played with his friends
pretend he even had a friend to say was his friend
and it wasn’t time to move and schools were changing again
he wasn’t socially awkward and just strange as a kid
he had a father and his mother wasn’t crazy as sh-t
and he never dreamed he could rip stadiums and just lazy as sh-t
f-ck a talent show in a gymnasium bitch you won’t amount to sh-t quit daydreaming kid
you need to get your cranium checked you thinking like an alien it just ain’t realistic
now pretend they ain’t just make him angry with this sh-t and there was no one he could even aim when he’s pissed it
and his alarm went off to wake him off but he didn’t make it to the rap Olympics slept through his plane and he missed it
he’s gon’ have a hard time explaining to Hailey and Laney these food stamps and this WIC sh-t
cuz he never risked shit he hopes and he wished it but it didn’t fall in his lap so he ain’t even here
he pretends that…

This comic comes from Hoom!, a sidebar comics blog. It is originally posted here.

I thought this comic was pretty good. The idea that there is that ‘perfect someone’ out there is common in our culture. People believe this. The social reality that most people aren’t that great, and therefore probably won’t end up with someone that great should be enough for people to agree that if they want love, they’ll have to put up with imperfections and be willing to improve themselves. But it’s usually not. Zoom out far enough logically though, and the idea of that perfect someone actually existing anywhere nearby is just stupid.

Love is great, but it’s hard work.

Flat head screws. These don’t need to exist anymore.

I’ve been prepping and moving my office over the last week. Over and over and over again, I have been assaulted by these little terrors.

Have you ever managed to screw one of these in without the screw driver sliding out? I haven’t and I probably never will. They are the source of so much frustration, I have to wonder why they’re even still produced and used for consumer applications and products.

My father argued that they looked nicer for finishing. Maybe. Unless you’re a little obsessive like me, in which case they actually look much worse unless they’re both tightened just right so the ridges are even. But that never happens. So instead, they take forever to screw in (if you can manage to do so without stripping the screw), and they’re uneven.

Screw you Phillips head! Pun definitely intended.

James 3:16:

“…where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and ever vile practice.”

We ask ourselves about some chronic sin, ‘why do I keep doing this?’, we look at our churches and say, ‘why don’t we look anything like the faithful depicted in scripture’, we look at our culture and our corporations and wonder, ‘why does that happen?’.

‘That lawsuit is just greedy.’

‘She hit me with her car, why is she yelling?’

‘Why isn’t he there for his kids?’

‘Why can’t he spend even one night without getting drunk and passing out?’

Sin has its roots in our personal and pervasive commitment to our own ambition. From the very first sin beneath that tree, it was only considering ourselves that lead us to neglect God and the purposes he had designed for us. And it continues today in every country, culture, people group, family and individual. Even the church. It is the personal commitment to self and our ambitions that leads to ‘disorder and every vile practice.’

I’ve often spoken to people frustrated by their inability to stop sinning. I sympathize because in so many ways, I suffer the same frustration.

The total message of James, and the frequently overlooked solution, I believe is this: We must see and trust God’s grace, and we must meet that with our own personal commitment to selflessness.

James 1:27:

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans, and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

As we know from the whole of scripture, by trusting God’s grace, we have the power to live a religion undefiled before God, and by our own commitment to selflessness, our actions, by the same grace of God, begin to fall in line with those of God’s desire.

Of course, that is all much easier written that worked. It’s a good thing grace is the much greater part, no matter what it’s contrasted with.

I think that most people at first have a hesitation to be honest about their struggles when speaking to someone they recently met, or that they don’t know well. It makes sense. We’re unsure of their reactions. We don’t know if they will be sympathetic or judgmental. We don’t know if they’ll understand.

Even more so, I think that most of us have that same hesitation with God, but for much deeper reasons. We know of God’s holiness, and even though we hear of and believe in Jesus’ sacrifice, there remains a disconnect. God his holy, we are not.

But just as it is with people, the more we get to know them, and the more they get to know us, the more aware we become of their struggles and imperfections. Most, in time, become sympathetic of our struggles and the judgment from people who we’ve become close to stops being a worry. We can look at them and know they’ll understand. We come to trust their sympathy.

John Piper makes, perhaps, the most intelligent argument for why we can have that same confidence before God, right out the gate.

“On the way to the cross for thirty years, Christ was tempted like every human is tempted. True, he never sinned. But wise people have pointed out that this means his temptations were stronger than ours, not weaker. If a person gives in to temptation, it never reaches its fullest and longest assault. We capitulate while the pressure is still building. But Jesus never did. So he endured the full pressure to the end and never caved. He knows what it is to be tempted with fullest force.”

Humans know the displeasure of failure, and that’s something. But no human understands the full force and weight of temptation to sin—except Jesus. When we sin, Jesus knows, and relates to every ounce of weight we experienced before meeting our failure.

As John Piper continues later, “Jesus feels with us, not against us.”

Before Jesus, in spite of God’s holiness, we are able to come with our struggles and failures. Not only before a gracious God with a legal obligation to pardon us, but with an emotional understanding of what led to our struggle and sin. He gets it. And not only in a cosmic, all-knowing sense, but in a real, “I’ve been there” sense. One that is much more potent than any brother or sister we might have confidence in.