Pipes

A couple of things:
1. The drinking water in Armenia is unreliable for a couple of reasons probably, but one reason I know of for sure: so pipes are designed to leak, right? They're going to leak anyway and so they're designed to leak to let pressure out as needed and to avoid needing being fixed incessantly because who has time for that? The idea, of course, is that the water pressure is high enough to keep bad stuff out--if water is always pushing out, nothing is ever seeping its way in. Except if, as is the case in Armenia, you end up turning off the water once or twice or whatever a day. Then, as the water pressure slows to a trickle and then to nothing, the icky, wet, muddy, rotting stuff hanging out near the pipes and enjoying a constant water supply makes its way into the pipes and so into your house. (Except if you have an industrial-strength, Salt Lake-issue water filter.)
2. When we talked about Revelation in Sunday School we talked about how precisely we're supposed to battle evil. It's evil, right? And there's a whole lot of it and we're commanded to love, so how do we love if we're simultaneously trying to find and snipe down evil? Luckily, I talked to Amandadam the night before this lesson was given and we came up with some very lovely tasting conclusions. Mostly one: out job isn't to smother out evil. Our job is to create as much good as we can because dark cannot exist where there is light.
3. I've been in a real funk lately. A funk because I don't have enough going to keep me in crisis mode and, as some of you have pointed out, I have no hobby to keep me busy. So I'm kind of just being. I feel better when I hang out with friends or take some initiative to accomplish things on my to-do list or when I keep myself occupied otherwise. I feel like I get in a funk when I go into passive mode: when I'm not putting enough good out there to keep bad stuff from getting into me. On a (yet) more abstract level, I think that this might be the key to being in the world but not of it...emitting enough light that no darkness can get into you, but as I'm not sure how that would work I'll leave it at this, the level applicable to me right now. I've got to be up and doing, or will be wrestled down and beaten by the world or my life or whatever.