kick my teeth in

My cat fell in the toilet last night, but if you think I'm going to stoop to that level for a story, you are wrong.

Pretty funny, though, hey? I'm just lying there in bed, reading and "SPLOOSH!" out comes a soaking cat. No details, though, on how clean or otherwise that water may have been. I mean, beyond the standard putrescence.

Let's talk about something else.

Like Ravi Zacharias, whom I think is pretty cool. He says something to me the other day, literarily speaking, that G.K. Chesterton said to him. Now, normally you gotta question a guy who goes by his initials. I mean, what's he hiding? But this Chesterton guy is pretty much the most primo cat I have almost never read.

Chesterton said that there is a difference between pessimism and sorrow. That was all - or at least all that was quoted.

It got me thinking, though, because I tend to worry about all these things I rattle on about, that I'd like to see changed. Am I wallowing in pessimism? Am I addicted to its better educated cousin, cynicism, and the sense of superiority it so often holds hands with? Maybe. But I hope not.

I hope, rather, that I am authentically, usefully responding to the sorrow that is (and, I believe, should be) my response to this tragically broken world. This is my hope: that I never lose faith and abandon sorrow for blindness, but that I temper this sorrow with humility and an abiding sense of my own complicity. If arm-chair cynicism becomes the seat I occupy, then I'm more than a part of the problem, I'm a pud.

I'm asking you (and because we're freinds, I know I can do this), if this becomes the case, to track me down, knock me over, and kick my teeth in.