June 24: Unconditional Forgiveness and Love, Gifts, New Cartoon

When I read my devotions and prayers this morning, I received a huge message about forgiveness.  I've been down on myself about some things recently, the kinds of things that sort of eat away at you.  I'm not going to get into details.  Fill in that blank yourself.  They fall somewhere on the spectrum between serial killing and voting Republican.

The message I received this morning was about unconditional forgiveness and unconditional love.  In my devotional, I read about God's ability to look through the crap of life and see the underlying goodness in everybody.  For those of you who prefer to keep God out of it, think Beauty and the Beast.  Beneath the hair and fangs and snout is the handsome prince worthy of love.  However you look at it, it's about the inherent worth of a person, despite character flaws and mistakes.

That's the message for today.  God's gifts aren't contingent upon how perfect you are.  They aren't dependent upon volunteering at a soup kitchen or donating tons of money to Haiti relief.  Don't get me wrong.  Those things are important.  We all should do things like that.  However, God (or Belle) will still love us, even if we don't.  That's what the "unconditional" part of unconditional love means.

We all deserve happily ever afters.

Saint Marty just got a happily ever after this weekend.  A brand new, HD flat screen TV.  Lawrence Welk never looked  better, right down to every last mole and ingrown hair.

Confessions of Saint Marty