(this is totally me. I took this picture in front of the mirror this morning)

Everyone pledges to lose weight “in the new year.”

Okay maybe not everyone.

Me. I pledged to lose weight in the new year.

The thing is, the first day of the New Year was a Monday. Now Monday is the perfect day to start a diet…but it was also a holiday. So no diet for me.

Now today is Tuesday. It’s not a holiday. It’s just Tuesday. But you can’t start a diet on Tuesday. No one does that.

So I’m going to take my pledge to lose weight “in the new year” and interpret it loosely, since the “new year” is 365 days long. I still have 363 days to start losing.

You’re laughing at me, but the fact is people use that same self-serving logic when interpreting the Bible. They read what is plainly written and, if it interferes with what they want to do, they either discard it entirely or they twist and turn and spin and contort it until it sort of maybe could almost say something that conveniently is exactly what I want to do.

And that’s how we have religious division.

I’m starting my diet tonight. I hope all my religiously-divided friends have the same attitude toward Scripture this year.