One Real Thing Is Closer

I Like A Cook Who Smiles Out Loud When He Tastes His Own Work. Let God Worry About Your Modesty; I Want To See Your Enthusiasm.

The Shock Of Unemployment Becomes A Pathology In Its Own Right.

We Are So Impressed By Scientific Clank That We Feel We Ought Not To Say That The Sunflower Turns Because It Knows Where The Sun Is. It Is Almost Second Nature To Us To Prefer Explanations . . . With A Large Vocabulary. We Are Much More Comfortable When We Are Assured That The Sunflower Turns Because It Is Heliotropic. The Trouble With That Kind Of Talk Is That It Tempts Us To Think That We Know What The Sunflower Is Up To. But We Don't. The Sunflower Is A Mystery, Just As Every Single Thing In The Universe Is.

The Church, By And Large, Has Had A Poor Record Of Encouraging Freedom. She Has Spent So Much Time Inculcating In Us The Fear Of Making Mistakes, That She Has Made Us Like Ill-taught Piano Students: We Play Our Songs, But We Never Really Hear Them Because Our Main Concern Is Not To Make Music To Avoid Some Flub That Will Get Us In Dutch.

He Comes To Us In The Brokenness Of Our Health, In The Shipwreck Of Our Family Lives, In The Loss Of All Possible Peace Of Mind, Even In The Very Thick Of Our Sins. He Saves Us In Our Disasters, Not From Them. He Emphatically Does Not Promise To Meet Only The Odd Winner Of The Self-improvement Lottery. He Meets Us All In Our Endless And Inescapable Losing.