A Life After Death

"Discipleship usually brings us into the necessity of choice between duty and desire"

I think I must be a really big nerd. I'm the kind of kid who absolutely hated and thought research papers were unfair in highschool (who knows what I thought was unfair about them!). But I am also the kind of kid who would always think of something and think what a neat research paper that would be. Maybe I just hate being limited. The confines of an unassignment suppress my creative juices. Or maybe I'm just a rebel at heart.
Maybe I would actually like college when I finally go there. Picking a major. Getting to study something I actually like. Who knows what that is going to end up being!

Lately I've thought about some of my grandmom's personality quirks that give me huge knots in the back or my neck. We're just about polar opposites ineverything. She is a perfectionist. I am the furthest thing from a perfectionist. She survives by cleaning incessantly. Now don't get me wrong, I am ALL about clean, but I will never ever be the kind of person who can spend an entire day cleaning, because with her, it's never clean enough. She is a bit on the miserly side, whereas money burns in my pocket and I've never had more than a 1000 dollars in my bank account at a time, and when there was that much, it didn't really exist because I was going to be writing a check out with it for some missions trip I was going on.

And I look at my grandmom's life. And I just wonder why she's gotten meaner in her old age. I notice that with a lot of old people. Is it because of thier aches and pains (i mean, I know I am pretty crabby when I'm not tip-top)? Is it because they've lost so many people they love? Is it because they know that they only have so many years left? Because if I knew I only had so many years left that I imagine that I would want to show everyone around me how much I loved them instead of complaining about them all the time.

Grumbling and Complaining. If I were writing a research paper on old people there would be a an entire Roman Numeral on this. Now I know why God's will is for us to not grumble and complain, because it's very unattractive- i know, i am very good at it. I don't know how my dad takes the complaining from her about him. I mean, she's his mother in law and he would stay up at the hospital basically having to lie on top of her so that she wouldn't run away until 3 in the morning for weeks and then get up for work at 6, and she has the nerve to complain about him to whoever she talks on the phone to. I guess some things in life are just unexplainable.

The funny thing is my grandmom's being pretty back to normal lately. And we realized that when she started complaining about everyone. When she was sick she was "happy nanny." We had this very strange week when she first got home from the hospital when she was happy and nice and generous all the time.

Another thing I would like to research is generosity and happiness in old people. I know that the elderly of this generation lived through a lot of hard times- depression, war, recessions, inflation, stagflation... and so you see a lot of miserly amongst the old people, and I have to wonder why the words "miserly" and "miserable" look a lot alike. My grandmom has money, and I don't need or want her money, but you do feel more loved when your grandmom gives you money for your birthday and then doesn't whine and complain on the phone to relatives about giving it to you- I mean, it's not like she has to, you know?

Now my other grandmom, she and my grandpop are very generous. They also live in a dirty trailor. But I know always know that she loves me and begs my dad to come over before I go on a missions trip so she can give me twenty bucks or something. Sometimes the twenty she gives out of her little means so much more than the fifty my other grandmom gives out of her increase- you know? I guess the story of the widow's mites is an example of that.