Given the time and an up-coming event, my friend Amy and I can log some serious miles on the shopping expressway.  We have different tastes but a mutual drive to steer each other toward purchases that will highlight our assets and downplay our trouble areas.  We’ve seen many a dressing room, re-hung many a blouse, and averted many a fashion mishap together.  It’s one of my favorite pastimes, shopping with Amy.  Whether we buy what we’ve tried on, there are always good, belly laughs and usually a meal involved – admirable priorities, if you ask me.

Sometimes, though, because of our schedules, we have to shop like this:

I’ll hear the notification sound on my phone indicating that a text message has come through.  Attached to the message will be a picture and, usually, a three-word message, “yes or no”… I have a katrillion of these pictures.  Some yeses, some nos.  All with that look of concentration as she tries to get her clothing in the picture and still be able to tap the camera button.  And, I don’t know what Amy does with the pictures she sends to me, but the ones I send to her become the standard at which I see myself.  They help me see what I look like. They help me understand what I look like to others.

I write for a myriad of reasons, one of the strongest reasons being that writing helps me process for understanding.  Being able to put into words an outcome or an end point, or a wall that I cannot seem to get over helps form acceptance and concrete contentment and solidifies the hope that there is more than a single circumstance staffolding my purpose in life.

I am, first and foremost, a believer.  A Bible-reader.  A Jesus-follower.  But, I confess:  I’m not very good at being a believer, Bible-reader, or Jesus-follower.  Some days are better than others but most are a comical show of me tripping over myself.  On and off-again, like a bad relationship on trashy television.  And, so I write to find the hope that tomorrow might be better than today.

These blog posts are more for me, in that case, than they are for you. Posts used to point out where God’s Grace is the only reason situations turn out well; posts that highlight my hypocritical nature in what I try to act on from the Bible and what is actually accomplished; posts that make me wonder how God doesn’t just roll His eyes and wash His hands of me, altogether.

But, maybe you’ll find some common ground between us, in these posts.  A mutual nodding of the head that brings us together in our quest to do better, be better.

The idiom, “Like the pot calling the kettle black” illustrates when a person is guilty of the very thing they point out in another.  I anticipate that many of the stories I tell will tag me the pot.  Or the kettle.  Both, being black.  And in desperate need of grace and mercy and reassurance and love.  It seemed an appropriate name for this blog.

The shopping selfies that Amy and I exchange from dressing rooms all over the Metroplex help us see what each other looks like in a particular clothing piece.  May you see these posts as selfies, too, helping you and me see where God has poked His divine intervention, mercy, and grace to make us do better, be better.