Archive for the ‘Quotations’ Category
Duty
Duty impresses a structured hierarchy onto our lives. Duty never says, “You be you,” or “Go ahead and do what makes you happy.” Duty says, “This is who you are; do what is required.”
C. R. Wiley, The Household and the War for the Cosmos
I felt this was the key difference between the movie and book versions of A Wrinkle in Time, and perhaps many other such pairs as well.
See also: Self-control
Inventory
As soon as you don’t read the New Testament, all these irreligions come up again, because the Bible isn’t written as a luxury of sentiment. It is written as the inventory of the stupidities of the human race.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954
Worship
We all worship, every one of us, gentlemen, where he does something for nothing, you see. And we serve the Devil where we want to get something for nothing, which most of you try to get all the time.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954
Logos
Gentlemen, physics is for those poor people, the physicists, who are only able to dabble with things who cannot talk back. But you and I, gentlemen, in our highest moments, live in a living universe in which all the voices of the universe talk.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954
Good Timber
Douglas Malloch, HT: Michael Foster
The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
But lived and died a scrubby thing.
The man who never had to toil
To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man
But lived and died as he began.
Good timber does not grow with ease:
The stronger wind, the stronger trees;
The further sky, the greater length;
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.
Where thickest lies the forest growth,
We find the patriarchs of both.
And they hold counsel with the stars
Whose broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much of strife.
This is the common law of life.
Patience
The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are.
Henri Nouwen, via John Barach
Easy
A world where everything was easy would be a nursery for babies, but not at all a fit place for men.
C. H. Spurgeon; HT: Michael Foster
See also: Better
Becoming
We sometimes think our child is deficient because he wants to touch the vase and we have to transform the child into somebody who does not want to touch the vase. But your task is not to teach the child how to be a child—the child already knows how to be a child. You are not teaching your children to be children. You are teaching your children to grow into adults.
This is why, when you are in this showdown across the coffee table, you should look into the future with the eye of faith and see your child standing where you are now standing and their children standing where he is now standing. And how will he know how to deal his son? He will have learned how from you!
If you do not know how to be patient in the face of repeated provocations, your children are not going to know either. When you discipline your children correctly, you are loving your grandchildren. Your job is not to teach them how to be an acceptable child, but to show them how to be a responsible adult—because that is the whole point.
Be honest—you bought the vase at a yard sale last summer and that vase is going to be in another yard sale this coming summer. Who cares about the vase? The child is going to live forever. The child is not something you acquired or are going to get rid of in a yard sale. The vase is. You are not teaching the child to be a good version of what they are. You are rather teaching them to be what they are becoming. . .
This principle does not change. Suppose you are dealing with an obstinate teenager and you are thinking “How to fix the teenager” is your task for the day. Your job is not to fix the teenager. Your task is to model for that teenager how to be a parent. Your teen, in just a few short trips around the sun, is going to have a teenager of her own. You are not training her to be a teenager. She has that down already. You are preparing her for the day when she won’t be. . . .
. . . If I have mastered all the parenting techniques but have not love, I am nothing . . .
Imagine a father and a son in the presence of an unsplit cord of wood. What is the father’s duty? His duty is to take two axes, hand one of them to his son, and to love God and to also love a morning of splitting wood, and to do so alongside his son whom he also loves. That is what godly childrearing is.
Love God, love what you are doing, and love the people God gave you to do it with. Does that remove the need to correct? No, you have to show them how to hold the ax and keep them from swinging it around carelessly. Correction, discipline, teaching, mentoring—all of it must be there because you love Jesus, because you love the wood, and because you love your son. That is what you must do.
Douglas Wilson, Why Children Matter, Chapter 13
See also: Self-control
Singing
Ephesians [5:1] says that God treats us as children. Since Scripture shows how He treats us, we should desire to be like Him in how we treat our children. As He deals with us, so we should deal with our own children. And we see from Zephaniah [3:17] that He rejoices over us.
When Jesus intervened to save us, He did so at great cost to Himself. When He took the loaf of bread that represented His own broken body, He picked it up and gave thanks. As Hebrews 12 says, Jesus did what He did on the cross “for the joy that was set before Him.” . . . God is mighty to save, and He saves with singing.
Now we know from the story of the whole Bible that saving people involves sacrifice, blood, and things being broken. He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us, but He did it with singing. Not only did Jesus give thanks the night He instituted the meal, but afterward they sang a psalm, and then they went out (Matt. 26:30; Mark 14:26). Jesus literally sang as He was preparing to go to the cross.
So, the sacrifices that you will make for your children should be something you can sing over. If there is not a song in it, it is not a biblical sacrifice. Without a song, it is a poor-me, look-at-the-martyr-go sacrifice, and those kinds of sacrifices have a very poor return. You are not just supposed to sing over your children when they are being adorable, asleep in their bed, and you can be at peace with them since they are not misbehaving at the moment. Life is messier than that, and the whole thing—including the mess—should be met with a song. The delight that we are imitating is not an unrealistic delight. This kind of delight takes account of the world as it is, and even so, it rejoices. You sing over your children when you are sacrificing for them, when you are taking the hit for them, and when they have no idea what you are giving up for them.
Douglas Wilson, Why Children Matter, Chapter 3
See also: Singing and slaying
I gotta have my orange juice. 
Creed
with 3 comments
Written by Scott Moonen
September 2, 2019 at 5:03 pm
Posted in Books, Commentary, Quotations