Renaming the Blog

While reading my psychology textbook, I discovered that the term "antisocial" technically refers to something far different from what I had intended to communicate in my blog's title. According to my textbook, "antisocial personality disorder [is] a personality disorder in which the person exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family members. May be aggressive and ruthless or a clever con artist." I don't think I want to associate myself with such a disorder. Even though the general public's definition of antisocial goes along with my former notion of the word (which was that antisocial people are uncomfortable around people or more comfortable alone), I'd rather change my blog's name now that I know the technical meaning for the term. I don't like my new title as much as I did the old one. I'll probably change it again when I find a word or phrase with a similar meaning that I like the sound of.

Tale as Old as Time

So this might sound a little sappy or whatever, but oh well. Maybe it's not as sappy as I'm thinking, since I generally put an unnecessary amount of effort into avoiding being sappy. I suppose a bit of over-sentimentality (or "spoony-ness" to use Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day from yesterday) isn't so bad every once in a while, if that's what this is. Ordinary sentimentality definitely isn't a bad thing in moderation. Now I'll stop rambling and get to the point so I can get back to work on less enjoyable things.

As my readers know, Ben's sermon this week was about God's omnitemporality. This morning during the sermon, the song "Tale as Old as Time" from Beauty and the Beast popped into my head. I thought about the song for a second and scoffed at the idea that the story of Beauty and the Beast was a "tale as old as time." But upon further reflection, I realized that the general idea of the story was in fact older than time. It was outside of time, even. God has chosen to love something decidedly unlovely: humanity (as we read in Romans 5:8). When I continued to think, I made yet another connection (well, actually I remembered a passage from Orthodoxy): not only has God chosen to love an unlovely thing, but because he loves it he's decided to make it into something lovely (as we read in Philippians 1:6). I can't help but thank God for all this. I've made my actual point in a few sentences, and yet these few facts are mind-boggling. I could (and should) spend quite a bit of time, or more appropriately all of my time, with these amazing, comforting truths in mind.