I’d been waiting weeks and even months for this. As I drove to my friends house, I was a bit nervous and excited. Truth be told, aside from my wife, this would be only the third time I’d ever watched anime with a friend.
A couple of months ago, I was talking to this friend about anime. During college, we’d talk anime quite a bit – he helped me really get into it, providing me with direction over which series to watch (I wouldn’t have watched Maison Ikkoku, now one of my favorites, without his suggestion). But now, like so many of us, he’d grown tired of the medium, watching hardly any anime the past several years.
In the course of our conversation, I mentioned The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and was shocked to find out that he’d never seen it. I thought that certainly, if any series could help an anime fan recover, it would be Haruhi. And so, when the time came, I brought my DVDs over for a mini-marathon of what is possibly my favorite series.
This whole series of events got me thinking back to much-repeated words of wisdom in Sunday sermons – wherever your time/wallet/energy/etc. is, there your heart is, too. After thinking about how excited I was about showing Haruhi to my friend, I pondered some on the order of significance of parts of my life. Basically, I want the order to be this:
1. God
2. Family
3. Everything else
But after considering where I put my money, my time, my energy, my resources, my commitment, and my thoughts, the real list ended up something like this:
1. Kids
2. Wife
3. Entertainment (including anime and sports)
4. Money
5. God
6. Possessions
7. Friends
As you can see, the list represents complete fail. Well, maybe not complete – a year ago, possessions might have been a notch higher on the list and God one lower. -_-‘
Still, the list emphasizes something – no matter where your mouth is, your actions determine where your heart is. I believe our hearts were designed for worship, and if this is true, we all worship something – whether at the feet of a deity or at something else, like self (by the way – if I combined most of the numbers on those list under the broader category of self, that would rank number one).
For me, the conclusion is obvious. The first commandment says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” And so, I’m a hypocrite. Maybe I’m a self-aware one that is trying (not as much as I should) to change and be a man of integrity, but a hypocrite nonetheless.
In the end, if I want my heart to match my mouth, I need to move – often against the grain of my desires.
By the way, back to my friend. How did he respond to my question of how he liked Haruhi after our viewing?
“It was okay.”
Where is your heart? What do you consider most important in your life? Do these two match?