Growing old in God

It is not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel; it is terribly difficult to sustain the interests. Millions of people in our culture make decisions for Christ, but there is a dreadful attrition rate.  Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim. In art and culture anything, even news about God, can be sold if it is packaged freshly; but when it loses its novelty it goes on the garbage heap. There's a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.

—Eugene H. Peterson, from A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

Sin—concealed, or revealed?

Those of whom God demands the most perfect hope* must look closely at their sins. This is to say that they must let God shine His lamp suddenly upon the darkest corners of their souls—not that they themselves must search out what they do not understand. Too much searching conceals the thing we really ought to find. Nor is it certain that we have any urgent obligation to find sin in ourselves. How much sin is kept hidden by God Himself, in His mercy? After which He hides it from Himself!

—Thomas Merton, from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

*I'm not sure, but I believe Merton was referring here to those called to monastic service. He was a Trappist monk.

For you

   Dear friends, let us look into the ocean through which Christ waded for us. He was without any comforts of God on the cross. No feeling that God loved him, no feeling that God pitied him, no feeling that God supported him. 

    God was his sun before, now that sun had become all darkness. Not a smile from His Father, not a kind look, not a kind word. 

   Nobody ever loved God and got this from God and yet loved anyway. Nobody ever loved people and got this from people and yet followed through. He went to hell for people. He was without a God as if he had no God. All that God had been to him was taken from him now. He had the feeling on the cross of being condemned. 

   He must have heard the judge say, ‘Depart from me, Ye cursed. You who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.’ That’s what he heard. 

   He felt that God said the same to him. Ahh, this is the hell which Christ suffered. Dear friends, I feel like a little child, casting a stone into some deep ravine in the mountainside, listening to hear it fall but listening in vain. It’s too deep. The longest line cannot fathom it. The ocean of Christ’s sufferings is unfathomable. He was forsaken and in the place of sinners. 

   If you grasp Christ as your surety and mediator, you will never be forsaken. From the broken bread and the poured out wine, do you not hear the cry arise, ‘My God, my God why hast Thou forsaken me!’ 

   And do you not hear the answer, ‘For you!’ For you.

—Robert Murray M'Cheyne, Scottish Presbyterian minister (1813-1843)

The Lockmaker

“If I found a key on the road, and discovered it fit, and opened, a particular lock in my house, I’d assume that most likely the key was made by the lockmaker.

And if I find a set of teachings set out in pre-modern oriental society that has proven itself with such universal validity, that has fascinated and satisfied millions of people in every century, including the best minds in history and the simplest hearts, that it has made itself at home in virtually every culture, inspired masterpieces of beauty in every field of art, continues to grow rapidly and spread and assert itself in lands a century ago where the name of Jesus Christ was not even heard.

Such teachings that obviously fits the locks of every human soul, in so many times and so many places, are they likely to be the work of a deceiver or a fool? In fact, it is more likely that they were designed, by the heartmaker.”

—G. K. Chesterton

Jack, Aldous and Jack

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. — John F. Kennedy*  

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. — Aldous Huxley  

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. — C. S. Lewis*  

Kennedy, Huxley and Lewis all died on the same day, November 22, 1963. This interesting factoid prompted a great book by Peter Kreeft, Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley.  Kreeft says in the foreword: 

"It would be part of “The Great Conversation” that has been going on for millennia. For these three men represented the three most influential philosophies of life in our human history: ancient Western theism (Lewis), modern Western humanism (Kennedy) and ancient Eastern pantheism (Huxley).

These three men also represented the three most influential versions of Christianity in our present culture: traditional, mainline or orthodox Christianity (what Lewis called “mere Christianity”), modernist or humanistic Christianity (Kennedy), and Orientalized or mystical Christianity (Huxley)."

*Both Kennedy and Lewis were called Jack by family and friends.

November 19, 1972

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. ---  

Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. — Milan Kundera, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel



Thank you, dearest Cheryl, for those three words spoken 37 years ago. I love you, too. --Wayne 

All truth is God's truth

"All truth is God's truth. It doesn't matter who's saying it or where it's coming from; if it's true, it's from God. Even if it's from Fargo."



Cathleen Falsani, author of The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers.