Category: Notes & Quotes

Batter my heart (John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV)

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due, Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Through the deep dark valley

Through the Deep Dark Valley by The Oh Hellos

This album is one of the most beautiful proclamations of the gospel I have heard in …maybe ever. I’ve just fallen in love with it, and it deserves to be preserved here. Listen to it in one sitting, all the way through, in proper order. It’s a concept album that basically takes you through the garden of eden, the fall of man, and restoration through grace. It’s poignant and artful and makes you think and it’s also musically excellent (acoustic/folk with uncommonly good melodies and more pep than most). Thanks to Tyler and Maggie Heath for creating this. Wherever you are I feel a sort of grateful kinship with you.

Anyways, please listen. Twice. or Thrice.

Tiny

I just watched the documentary Tiny: A Story About Living Small. It was very inspiring! As a millennial I cannot help but resonate with the “shifting values” of these two young people who built a house of 124 square feet and put it on a plot of picturesque land in Colorado. I want to live simply, to focus on relationships. I do feel disconnected with the ideal that dignity must be attached to the amount of your possessions. While for many in the Tiny House Movement, such ideals represent a merely transcendental worldview, I think that such ideals could (should?) be a real part of a balanced Christian worldview as well. America’s pendulum perhaps needs to move that direction. It’s also an inspiring story of starting a design and construction project and carrying it through, which is inspiring to me, who has little construction prowess but is the son of a man with much. Anways, if you have Netflix, I recommend you watch it.

Far too easily pleased

C.S. Lewis’s famous passage in The Weight of Glory bears repeating in this blog:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. (26)

God let me find by faith such joys in your right hand that I will release all others.

 

http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/we-are-far-too-easily-pleased

11 life lessons from Bill Gates

Bill Gates delivered these lessons to high schoolers some years ago. Humorously note the dated references in Rule 3, but also note the general, practical wisdom throughout. 

Rule 1: Life is not fair – get used to it.

Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone, until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Originality

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
– C. S. Lewis

My Deliverer (Rich Mullins)

This is an old-school song from the 90’s, but I absolutely love it, and have since my childhood. It is the song of a hope in future grace so powerful that it becomes a song of present courage. And I love the strings and ocarina – it makes it epic, musically. For fun, listen to the one line sung by Michael W. Smith toward the end!

Sayings NOT found in scripture

From the Blue Letter Bible (awesome resource!)

Moderation in all things.
Once saved, always saved.
Better to cast your seed….
Spare the rod, spoil the child.
To thine ownself be true.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
God helps those who help themselves.
Money is the root of all evil.
Cleanliness is next to godliness.
This too shall pass.
God works in mysterious ways.
The eye is the window to the soul.
The lion shall lay down with the lamb.
Pride comes before the fall.