Oh this is some kind of life

I've heard it said life is unfair and that God cannot exist because of ______ (fill in your choice of trite argument based on human logic). I don't buy it. I mean, nobody ever promised anybody that life would be fair. When I hear that, my response however juvenile is, "yeah, duh." The challenge we are presented with- and yes, it is a challenge indeed- is to turn our suffering into growth and to love everybody, everything, all of creation. Loving someone doesn't mean liking their character, necessarily, but understanding it- not sympathizing with it- just understanding without judging in order to love better. Like Jesus says (and I'm totally paraphrasing from memory), "what is it to love those who love you? Even sinners love those who love them." The idea, of course, being to love your enemy as yourself. That is difficult to do. The more I think about the way I act and the thoughts that are in my head, the more I am convinced that I have a lot of work to do on myself, so no matter how "messed up" I'm thinking this other person is, I really must learn how to remember that taking the right path is so difficult and we happen to be quite blind to many important things about our actions and how we could make them that we would be better. Pride is a big cause of blindness, I've definitely found for myself. Also, I'm pretty sick of how society treats Christianity these days. I see a lot of issues with Western Christianity because it strayed from the original Church teachings (if you can't tell yet, I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian- or a catechumen, anyway). I've been an atheist before; I've been Protestant before; I've thought about Catholicism before; I've been agnostic before; I've been a pseudo-Buddhist before; when I was a child, my family went to churches in which people just gathered 'round waiting to be... entertained by a miracle, ready to will themselves into a trance: I was a passionate and mercurial teenager with a restless nature. I felt firmly about each (or in the case of agnosticism, well, you know). None of them, however, had for me what Orthodoxy has for me. Orthodoxy has the emphasis on humility and love that I think is absolutely essential to the content of any attempt at a statement of truth. Here is another relevent quote from Christ: "Become good and merciful like your Father in Heaven, and as He rains on bad and good and makes the sun to rise on just and unjust alike, so also is the one who has real love, and has compassion, and prays for all." I'll write again soon about Orthodoxy. Time for bed- this is the latest I've stayed up in months.