“All a man’s ways are pure in his eyes, but the LORD takes the spirit’s measure” (Proverbs 16:2). The first part isn’t true of everyone all the time. But it’s probably true of everyone some to most of the time. And certainly very often true of me. Lord, help us to discern.
I cannot reliably control my circumstances. I cannot at all control other people. But I can control my (current) self. Herein lies happiness.
A truism, perhaps. But one worth repeating, especially to someone like myself who scores, mostly to his chagrin, as an 8 on the Enneagram.
Proverbs also very frequently locates wisdom in how we receive correction.
Proverbs so often puts the locus of wisdom on what we say.
Our culture’s current and very understandable hangups about the injustice of forgiveness can be resolved by defining it as threefold:
- dismissal (of a wrong) as impetus to retaliation
- dismissal as impetus to resentment
- dismissal as impetus to alienation or reduction in standing
That list is not only a division, but also perhaps a progression: First, in very clear obedience to our Lord and to keep our communities and society from tearing themselves to shreds, we refuse to retaliate, despite our probably justifiable anger.
Second, and perhaps only as (a lot of) time passes but facilitated by both free ventilation and the wrongdoer’s repentance, we moderate our anger until it thoroughly dissipates. This part is an art, not a science: In the knowledge that we’re all quite capable of sin and likely blind to some of our own wrongdoing, we constantly tack toward total abatement of animosity and we refuse to cling to ill will; however, knowing that there are indeed things God hates, neither do we falsify anger’s cessation. As long it hangs around, we give it air when it’s time to give it air and let it motivate us to good deeds and systemic rectification.
Third, and properly only once the offender has confessed his or her sin, made amends, requested forgiveness, and otherwise shown ample evidence of complete repentance, we open the door to the end of ostracism, estrangement, and other relational sanctioning.
Technically, the second and third are interchangeable in order. Anger can and does linger even after witnessing repentance. But often, wrongdoers remain unrepentant, or at least inauthentically or unsatisfactorily repentant, which, while it renders the second form of forgiveness difficult, depending on the gravity of the offense renders the third form of forgiveness so hazardous to wrongdoer and injured alike that love requires it be withheld entirely. It is thus listed here last, even though, ideally, it’s something we should want, and deeply. If we love our enemies, how can we not?
God can and on some occasions does extend the last kind of forgiveness in the absence of amends because He is unassailable, rendering forgiveness less hazardous. But even He, for the sake of moral hazards to the sinner and the sinner’s neighbors, usually does not. We are to confess our sin against Him, point gratefully to the Cross as our amends, request forgiveness, and bear fruit in keeping with repentance, including making amends with our neighbors when our sin against God is coterminous with our sin against them.
I preached a meditation on hope in the New Testament to help the folks of University Baptist & Brethren Church ring in the first Sunday of Advent. (Here’s video evidence.)
There is a very fine line between abstruseness and nonsense. And neither writer nor reader can distinguish for sure.
If your hope for heaven holds that nothing you do here matters, then to hell with it.
Heaven is not a judgement-free zone.
Kitchen towels are much more effective at soaking up water if, instead of constantly moving them around, you let them rest. My attention is a kitchen towel.
I don’t feel at work the stress I feel at home, where stress accompanies not only the drive to get things done, but even the desire for recreation!
Why the difference? I’m not certain. But my surmises are several:
- For one, I’m explicitly working for other people. That relieves me of the kind of internal pressure I feel when I’m working on my own stuff.
- It also helps that those other people for whom I’m working are trustworthy and trust me. That means I basically have liberty to do as I please.
- I have liberty to do as I please as long as I color within the lines a distinct mission: To maximize the security, resilience, utility, and accessibility of DiamondBack’s information. That unity of purpose helps.
- Finally, five days a week I enjoy eight-hour expanses of time in which do the work.
- Oh, and I’ve largely managed to avoid working under deadlines.
Might I import those circumstances into my non-DiamondBack life? Yes. And in :
- I can view myself as explicitly working for God.
- God is trustworthy and trusts me to do as I please.
- The unity of purpose is easy to identify: The great commandments.
- As for time: Why so serious? What’s the rush? All of life is a gift.
From that last point, maybe the shorthand of it all is to feel that I get to do all the things: Whether I’ve actively decided to do something or that something is decided for me, it is all gratuity. Even adversity stimulates thought and the growth of wisdom and resilience. That’s how I feel at work. (How fortunate is that?) May I bring that feeling to bear in the rest of my life.
Here’s my latest working definition: “forgive”
“Hold fast to reproof, don’t let go. Keep it, for it is your life” (Proverbs 4:13, Alters). Lord, may I cherish correction.
So far, Potts’ Forgiveness: An Alternative Account seems beautiful…and spurious.
Name a movie in which there’s a disagreement between child and parents and the parents turn out to have been unequivocally right.
I’ll wait.
The difficulty in answering this question is representative of a major cultural problem. Filial piety is miles better than whatever it is we’re doing now (just-try-to-keep-the-kids-safe-and-happy-ism?), but it stands zero chance of ever working if it gets zero support from culture machines.
O, for hymnody that combines awe, piety, and moral effort.
Faith, hope, and love can all be misguided.
Hope is:
- an imagined, desired future that you feel could come to pass and which prompts you to act accordingly,
- the supposed bringer of that future, or
- the feeling that accompanies imagining that future
Fear is the undesired version of the same.
Listening to Peter Gabriels’s “Big Time” with the volume cranked up is an excellent way to extract and maintain one’s hold on the verve created by a winning streak but satirically strip out the attendant bigheadedness.
Familiarity breeds laxity.
By this I mean that in my relationships with my wife and kids, I am not consistently stanced to apply the same effort toward socially sensitive demeanor and diction that I do in my relationships with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. My habitus outside the family is more disciplined and sympathetic than that within. There’s a certain alertness and natural effort to fit with other people that seems to arise only outside the comfortable confines of home.
I’d like to reimport that stance back into my home life. Sure, home is for relaxation. But I sense in myself a slackness of love. Carla, Sullivan, and Éa deserve better.
I have occasionally found myself wondering whether journaling and posting as frequently as I have been is good. Doing so requires time and attention that I could deploy toward other, more directly interpersonal matters. And it’s probably sometimes a neurotic response to the fear of death. But the fact is I do feel more fully alive when I have been writing. And just now, as I was grabbing a late-morning protein snack from the kitchen, it occurred that I would pay a non-significant sum to have access to the collected written output of my parents, my grandparents, or my great-grandparents. The more voluminous and representative of their psyches I knew their output to be, the higher sum I would pay. I want to know them. It would be good for me to know them. It would be good in the way similar to how reading a great novel is good: You get to know your fellow humans, you cultivate sympathy, and you get to know yourself, all of which foster loving, harmonious, sympathetic, self-controlled interactions with others.
If I can provide my descendants with a thick account of who I was, I find myself suddenly quite confident they will be the better for it. And not because I’m a paragon. No, even if I were a scoundrel, I think they’d be the better for it.
Lord, help me to distinguish righteousness from scruples.
The Holy Spirit ≠ spontaneity. The Holy Spirit ≠ awe at nature. The Holy Spirit ≠ frissons, feelings, or warm fuzzies. The Holy Spirit’s presence and activity may sometimes be coterminous with these phenomena. But He is not them, and the presence of these phenomena does not mean He is at work. Thinking otherwise can be quite misleading. Look instead for the fruit.
Lord, grant me a good, true, and beautiful sense of what is good, true, and beautiful.
You have heard it said, “Hate has no home here.” But I say to you, make a home for hate your heart. Hate heartily that which is hateful, including, yes, hate itself of any human being.
This is, I admit, merely a prescriptivist’s kvetch, since at some point somebody certainly did sneak a definition into the word “hate” that appears to mean “hostility and aversion based on category of human, such as skin color or sexuality.” But this new definition must not be permitted to elbow out its very useful precursor, that is, simply, “intense or passionate dislike.” Hate, defined as such, is, like trust and guilt, a very good thing—a virtue, even—when its is justly pointed. (I don’t need to point out the same about love, although the inverse is worth saying: Love is a very bad thing when it is unjustly pointed.) And there are plenty of things good and right to hate: ecocide, betrayal, unjustified violence, selfishness, and so on.