Calendar dates, plans, facts, names, times..
They peel backwards like lead paint.
The details become lost. They are forgotten.
Achievable goals become another thumb tack on the bulletin board. Your life summed up in a schedule. They want artificial commitment, superficial productivity; mechanisms of a manufactured life.
Is it just discipline or self righteousness?
Is the people you encounter everyday figments of your own aspirations?
Are you ahead?
Flourishing?
Buzz words flashing across a digital screen; augmented Neon dully fizzling out and blinking like old light bulbs.
A reconstruction, a simulation; false memories screaming across the dead silence of night.
Are you woke?
Do you dully stare out your window every morning and wonder only about yourself?
Do you have a five year plan?
If not, why?
You have a degree?
If so, why?
A resolution or cultural prostitution?
Transformation, mandates, a year long plan.
It's structured and customized.
Clean and efficient.
Expecting it to fit the unexpected.
Forcing it upon the supernatural.
Dulling the senses.
Progress or sanctification?
A conception of self will?
Is it really planning ahead, self mastery, or tyranny of your own fate?
"What if I call on security?
That mean I'm calling on God for purity
I went and got me a therapist
I can debate on my theories and sharing it
Consolidate all my comparisons
Humblin' up because time was imperative
Started to feel like it's only one answer to everything, I don't know where it is.
Popping a bottle of Claritin
Is it my head or my arrogance?
Shaking and moving, like, what am I doing? I'm flipping my time through the Rolodex
Indulging myself and my life and my music, the world that I'm in is a cul-de-sac
The world that we in is just menacing, the demons portrayed religionous
I wake in the morning, another appointment, I hope the psychologist listenin'"
- Kendrick Lamar, United In Grief (2022)
"I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company"
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)
"It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth"
- Antonin Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods (1921)
"Father's rule had been 'Question everything, take nothing for granted,' and I never outlived it, and I would suggest it be made the motto of a world journalists' association.”
— George Seldes, Witness to a Century: Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs (1987)
"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love"
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1879)
"We are scattered, stunned; the remnant of heart left alive is filled with brotherly hate... Whose fault? Everybody blamed somebody else. Only the dead heroes left stiff and stark on the battlefield escape"
- Mary Chesnut, Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981)
"[I]f the supreme magistrate does not keep his pledged word, and fails to administer the realm according to his promise, then the realm, or the ephors and the leading men in its name, is the punisher of this violation and broken trust. It is then conceded to the people to change and annul the earlier form of its polity and commonwealth, and to constitute a new one"
- Johannes Althusius, Politica (1603)
"The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit. Today, what it means to be a “conservative evangelical” is as much about culture as it is about theology"
- Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)
"Authority does not authenticate my person. Authority is not a privilege to be exploited to build up my ego. Authority is a responsibility to be borne for the benefit of others without regard for oneself. This alone is the Christian view"
- John Piper, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (1991)
"Richard Hayes observes, “the New Testament calls those with power and privilege to surrender it for the sake of the weak …. It is husbands (not wives) who are called to emulate Christ’s example of giving themselves up in obedience for the sake of the other (Eph. 5:25) …. [Interpreting this] as though it somehow warranted a husband’s domination or physical abuse of his wife can only be regarded as a bizarre—indeed, blasphemous—misreading. . . . The followers of Jesus—men and women alike—must read the New Testament as a call to renounce violence and coercion"
- Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothius, Discovering Biblical Equality: Complimentary Without Hierarchy (2004)
"Are the women in your church the only ones learning about submission? Or is submission taught, as Andrew Bartlett has helpfully defined it, as “the heart of Christ-centered gospel living”
- Aimee Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (2020)
"Men have authority, and as go the men, so go the women and children. Yet we are facing a crisis of masculinity in the church. Men have failed to lead, including our pastors, and now our women are acting like men and our men like women. To recover from this crisis of masculinity, we must start with God the Father. We must start with worship. Christianity has a masculine message of a husband who laid down His life for His bride. But we have an effeminate church preaching an effeminate gospel, proclaiming Jesus as Savior while ignoring His command for male rule in His kingdom"
- Zachary Garris, Masculine Christianity (2020)
"Radically ordinary hospitality does not simply flow from the day-to-day interests of the household. You must prepare spiritually. The Bible calls spiritual preparation warfare. Radically ordinary hospitality is indeed spiritual warfare"
- Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World (2018)
"Arbitrary governing hath no alliance with God"
- Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex (1644)
"The healthy Christian is not necessarily the extrovert, ebullient Christian, but the Christian who has a sense of God's presence stamped deep on his soul, who trembles at God's word, who lets it dwell in him richly by constant meditation upon it, and who tests and reforms his life daily in response to it"
- J.I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (1990)
"Much of this behavior grew out of his faith, his desire to be uncompromisingly truthful at all times, and his very particular sense of Christian courtesy. He explained his refusal to voice disapproval of others by saying, “It is quite contrary to my nature to keep silence where I cannot but disapprove. Indeed I may as well confess that it would often give me real satisfaction to express just what I feel, but this would be to disobey the divine precept [judge not lest ye be judged]"
- S.C. Gwynne, Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson (2014)
"That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence"
- Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (1952)
"Hitler was “someone seduced by himself,” someone who was so inseparable from his words “that a measure of authenticity flowed over the audience even when he was telling obvious lies"
- Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (2016)
"Be adored among men,
God, three-numberéd form;
Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,
Man's malice, with wrecking and storm.
Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,
Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;
Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:
Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then"
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose (1953)
"Victor Klemperer, who had escaped the February inferno in Dresden with his wife by fleeing to Bavaria, noted: “Now everyone here was always an enemy of the party. If only they really had always been that…The Third Reich has been practically forgotten.” Twelve years previously, the opposite had been the case, as Friedrich Kellner recalled all too well. When Hitler had come to power in early 1933, he wrote, many Germans had tried to prove “with the most threadbare arguments” that they had “always been National Socialists.”
- Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945 (2020)
"Is it not possible that one reason for the spiritual weakness of the church is her failure to honor God on the Lord’s day? Is it not possible that one reason our churches are not more effective in reaching the lost is because we are not practicing the Sabbath-keeping that brings us victory? Could this be true of us as individuals as well? Is it not possible that you continue to fall under the dominion of some particular sin because you have refused to sanctify God’s day in your heart? We lack victory because we have failed to recognize and utilize one of the God-given means of victory, while those who keep the Sabbath have victory"
- Joseph A. Pipa Jr, The Lord's Day (1997)
"It is not that man overcomes his estrangement as his soul deals directly with God in some sort of mystical experience. Rather, Jesus the stranger condescends to fallen man. This means that man’s redemption is inextricably bound with redemptive history, as God has progressively revealed Himself in covenant to His corporate people, culminating in His revelation in Christ. Knowledge of God is openly revealed in the concrete events of redemptive history in God’s condescension to His fallen creatures"
- J.V. Fesko, Word, Water, and Spirit: A Reformed Perspective on Baptism (2013)
"If Christ loved the weak believer to the extent of laying down his life for his salvation, how alien to the demands of this love is the refusal on the part of the strong to forego the use of a certain article of food [or anything else] when the religious interests of the one for whom Christ died are thereby imperiled! It is the contrast between what the extreme sacrifice of Christ exemplified and the paltry demand devolving upon us that accentuates the meanness of our attitude when we discard the interests of a weak brother. And since the death of Christ as the price of redemption for all believers is the bond uniting them in fellowship, how contradictory is any behavior that is not patterned after the love which Christ’s death exhibited"
- John Murray, Epistle to the Romans (1960)
"He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy’s breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. The words were as silent as seed opening one at a time in his blood"
- Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (1960)
"No one can travel so far that he does not make some progress each day. So let us never give up. Then we shall move forward daily in the Lord's way. And let us never despair because of our limited success. Even though it is so much less than we would like, our labor is not wasted when today is better than yesterday"
- John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559)
"Our superintendence in instruction and discipline is the office of the Word, from whom we learn frugality and humility, and all that pertains to love of truth, love of humanity, and love of excellence. And so, in a word, being assimilated to God by participation in moral excellence, we must not retrograde into carelessness and sloth. But labor, and faint not"
- Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor (198 AD)
