End of 2020

Today is the last day of 2020. You may be cheering for that. Or you may be mourning for all the loss that happened this year. Or maybe both.

Be careful though, just because we turn the calendar does not mean that everything stops and something new starts. The plague went on for many years. Both world wars raged on for multiple years.

We’ve gotten so used to things happening in short spaces of time that we put ourselves in danger when we expect that everything else also lives in those time frames. They don’t.

Here’s what 2020 taught me — the good, the bad, and the ugly edition.

Let’s start in reverse order, mostly because I am an eternal optimist and I’d rather get through the crappy stuff first in order to appreciate the good stuff at the end.

The Ugly: I learned how ugly people can be. The ugliness of narcissism and those that make excuses for narcissistic behaviors is sickening. I learned how much some segments of Christianity should really take on a new title because it isn’t Jesus they are worshipping. I learned that there is a pretty serious virus out there that has been around for a really long time and it reared its ugly head this year and shouted out loud. That virus was willful stubbornness and selfishness. These are related to narcissism too. But these viruses inflected many people — some I had to distance myself from throughout the year. The unfortunate truth is that there is no outside cure for these viruses. There has to be a willingness to change — to repent from these…