Today I learned a little bit.

There was a girl who was talking about her past relationships; she said that she had a bad breakup, so she got back at her boyfriend by quickly finding another guy who liked her and going out with him and telling her ex about it. She said "it worked" and "he almost got back together with [her]" and she doesn't feel guilty at all.

I don't know how to feel about it. First of all, I don't think I would ever get back together with a girl who did that to me. ... That kind of thing... I feel like that kind of behavior is so ... I guess the only good way to put it is "beneath me". But the reason it startles me, is that this girl is someone who I know, and who is definitely not beneath me. No, honestly, I consider that kind of emotional gameplay to be completely detestable.

I was initially torn between trying to sympathize with her or justify the behavior, and being disgusted by her. That's when I realized two things:
1. I am super judgmental, and I need to cool it or I'm gonna become a douche or a snob. If someone does something I don't like, I need to remember that we are equals, and that I've also done plenty of things I don't like.
2. It's a similar situation with my dad. I don't like what he did, and I consider it to be detestable, but I don't have to choose between respecting him 100% or 0%. I can 100% respect the good things that he's done, and I can 0% respect the bad, all the while 100% honoring and loving him.

Dad is my father, and he is a part of my family, which gives him a deeply rooted emotional bond to each of us in the family. We are each ethereally responsible for his actions, by a connection for which there is no metric -- an idea that people just know because it's unanimous. Like love: we have a word for it, but we don't really know what it is. Dad is (still) the mighty patriarch of my family, and for the first 18 years of the lives of all his children, we bent to his will.

Dad is all that, but he is also a person. He is my equal as a sinner, and we are failures together, held together by God just like the rest of mankind. If we can't accept our status as imperfect or incapable, we will never be able to move forward and have peace at the same time. We can take this thorn in our sides -- bad decisions are like a single stake on which we are all impaled together -- and use it to bring us closer together in a new way. Nobody said it would be easy to live with, but it doesn't have to kill us.

Just remember, God loves us. Jesus sees all this flash before his eyes in an instant and then says "God, forgive them, because they don't know what they are doing." This is just more dirt that we need to shower off.

"You are so precious to me!"