The Middles

Na'arah = young lady. With two daughters plunging into double digits, I'm reminded of a quote that I chant to myself almost every single day. "I think middles are middles. In the beginning of parenting, the exhaustion is mitigated by the excitement and hope of all new beginnings. Plus baby cuteness. At the end, the burdens of young adult issues and the poignancy of growing up and parting are mitigated by the amazement and joy of seeing who your children have become, and hopefully some relief from the daily parenting press. In the middle you don't have either of those, and it's time for getting up every day and faithfully going on - perseverance, laying down your life, and the weariness of feeling like you're saying the same thing over and over, and yes, to people who don't seem to like all that much a lot of times. But there in that vital crucible of the middle, people are being shaped and formed. In the middle, children are being crafted into beautiful vessels - and so are their parents." Kristin Wong

Man's desires can now be developed so that they will greatly overshadow his needs.  Of course there exists theoretically that danger point when consumption is reached its limit but such a breaking point is probably non-existant.  Human desire seems to have no limit.  Educate the world to want and the production capacity of the country will groan under the burden of enormous demand.  There may be limits to the consumption of particular products.  There is no theoretical limit to general consumption possibilities.

-Paul Mazur
Wall Street banker for Lehman Brothers
1928!

Comprehensiveness of Sin

The comprehensiveness of sin is mirrored much clearer against the comprehensiveness of the law.
-Steve Telian

The Whole Earth Groans - Romans 8:19-22

When God gives up the world to futility, he did not do so vindictively but redemptively.  He allows us to live on our own, in our own futility.  This is severe mercy.

God cannot trust us to the full knowledge of His ways.
-Chuck Jacob

Nicholas Wolterstorff

"If sympathy for the world's wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, 
if love for those around us is not expanded, 
if gratitude for what is good does not flame up, 
if insight is not deepened, 
if commitment to what is important is not strengthened, 
if aching for a new day is not intensified,
if hope is weakened and faith diminished,
if from the experience of death comes nothing good, then death has won. Then death, be proud.
So I shall struggle to live the reality of Christ's rising and death's dying."
-Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son, p. 92-93

David Wells on Prayer

Prayer is rebellion against the world in its fallenness, the absolute and undying refusal, to accept as normal what is so perversely broken.
-David Wells

St. Augustine

How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose and was now glad to reject! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood, you who outshine all light yet are hidden deeper than any secret in our hearts, you who surpass all honor though not in the eyes of men who see all honor in themselves. At last my mind was free from the gnawing anxieties of ambition and gain, from wallowing in filth and scratching the itching sore of lust. I began to talk to you freely, O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation.