Busy like the ants, Day 321

I've this 500 or so page blog swirling around in my head. It's boiling and festering and ready to burst all over this keyboard but I don't think anyone would understand the chaos (or choose to read it) so I'm trying to gather it into cohesive bits of ideas.

The way I see it, and it ends up being a gross misuse of the word, everyone is BUSY, like the ants or elephants or fish. Whether or not anyone is productively busy is potentially unanswerable. The ants gather and store. I imagine not because anyone told them to but because nature has been created that way and in order to survive they follow the paths of nature. The elephants and penguins and polar bears and birds and fish migrate every single year like clock work. Probably not because the momma elephants told the little elephants, "this is what we must do, so always do it and teach your baby elephants the same." It's all nature. It's all a matter of survival. I'm not any sort of expert or schooled on this subject but I imagine that's the case.

I've lived long enough to have witnessed horrible addictions; life quenching, life threatening, life destroying addictions. I've seen intense OCD. I've known a lot of snotty mean people who I'm pretty sure don't think they're so. I've seen lazy, messy people who don't seem to care one way or the other about their world collapsing around them. I've seen people DEEPLY and unalterably wound other people who they truly love. And even to the other extreme I've seen people who "have it together" to such an extent that they're unable to let a ball drop without losing it altogether.

We're busy just like the ants; we're busy trying to keep the path trod that's been trod before us at all cost no matter if the crumb we choose to carry will end up crushing us, or if the path leads through a playground where giant kids are standing by ready to smoosh you and everyone you love. God created us but we were made by our parents, by our societies, by the things we chose to read and watch and listen to. We're very busy, not becoming who we want to be but being who we've become. I really believe this. I really believe that we're clinging to our lives, holding on for dear life even if the elephant trail is leading to an empty water hole. We have what we've been given and in our eyes there isn't anything more, or different.

I guess that's the first bit.

Then Jesus answered, “Will you really lay down YOUR life for me? I tell you the truth, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times! John 13:38