a quote and a conversation

1. Taken from Conversion Diary's most recent post about living God's will: "My motives are mostly good, but the problem is that it's too easy to start to think of God's will as a detailed blueprint for one specific situation, to the extent that I sometimes fall into a vague feeling that God doesn't really care what I do in any other areas of my life as long as I'm doing the right thing with the big project he called me to undertake." And, in the same article - "I think that what God is trying to teach me right now -- that he's been trying to teach me for a long time but I never seem to get because of my controlling, scheming nature -- is that I need to stop thinking of "living God's will" as some complicated set of long-term plans for specific endeavors, and start thinking of it as simply an immediate, constant act of selfless love." Me too. It's the "constant" part that gets me. I can do it in spurts, but consistently thinking of others - even when my little ones are melting down, or I'm running late, or, or - is where I am lacking.

2. Asher asked me what his soul was in the car today. Do YOU have a two-year-old's working definition for a soul? I can usually keep up with Asher's questions, but that one made me pause. It led into a conversation about death and Heaven and God, and - unbelievably - that seemed to make sense to him. At least, it caused him to nod in agreement and ask when Daddy would be home, so either it bored him or made sense to him. Hard to tell. But really, how would you describe a soul in concrete terms?