A Quote by Jonathan Kent
We like t'believe that everything's got an explanation...that our years on this earth make a safe kinda sense. We build ourselves up with explantions and rationalizations t'make us nice and comfortable--an' some people manage t'get through their lives without ever having to question any of it. But I think most of us have learned that...just when we least expect it...something comes droppin' down out o' the heavens...that blows all our comfortable ideas right t'pieces.
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Some people think elections are a game: who's up or who's down. It's about our country. It's about our kids' future. It's about all of us together. Some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some difficult odds. We do it, each one of us, against difficult odds. We do it because we care about our country. Some of us are right, and some of us are not. Some of us are ready, and some of us are not. Some of us know what we will do on day one, and some of us haven't thought that through.
Some people come into our lives and they move our souls to sing and make our spirits dance. They help us to see that everything on earth is part of the incredibility of life... and that it is always there for us to take of its joy. Some people come into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts and we are never ever the same.
Yes, God does expect us to live holy, consecrated lives. But not even the best of our intentions can make it happen. Thankfully, He doesn't expect us to make ourselves holy. He just wants us to learn to depend on Him to make us holy.
I call the years when our children are between six and twelve the "golden years," not because everything's perfect . . . but because the kids are capable and independent. . . . They're becoming fascinating human beings who continually astound us and make us laugh. And they build our self-esteem. They still adore us for the most part, not yet having reached that age of thinking everything we do is dumb, old-fashioned and irrelevant.
Jesus did not die on the cross just so we could live comfortable, well adjusted lives. His purpose is far deeper: He wants to make us like himself before he takes us to heaven. This is our greatest privilege, our immediate responsibility, and our ultimate destiny.
I think our brains does have a tendency to be true to its own ideas and statements. Everything we do and everything we think about is a belief. Until we get to the point where we look beyond our own ego-self, and to some degree beyond our own mind, we are always going to make assumptions and have beliefs to make our brains feel more comfortable. And if we can get to a point where we embrace that uncertainty and doubt, and be willing to learn from that and to explore that, I think that that could be a very positive experience.
It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character that we play. That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem for us. We feel justified in being annoyed with everything. We feel justified in denigrating ourselves or in feeling that we are more clever than other people. Self-importance hurts us, limiting us to the narrow world of our likes and dislikes. We end up bored to death with ourselves and our world. We end up never satisfied.
What I have learned lately is that people deal with death in all sorts of ways. Some of us fight against it, doing everything we can to make it not true. Some of us lose our selves to grief. Some of us lose ourselves to anger.
Donald Trump is out to destroy people's lives, and he's trying to take our democracy down. That is something we can fight with everything we've got, but having compassion for one another while we do it is going to get us a lot further.
But I think it’s important to discuss just how easy it is for any of us to get caught up in things that might seem unthinkable—to get sucked into the wrong environment and make moral compromises that can tarnish us terribly. We like to think that we change our environment, but the truth is that it changes us. So we have to be extraordinarily careful to choose the right environment—to work with, and even socialize with, the right people. Ideally, we should stick close to people who are better than us so that we can become more like them.
My brethren, let me say, be like Christ at all times. Imitate him in "public." Most of us live in some sort of public capacity-many of us are called to work before our fellow-men every day. We are watched; our words are caught; our lives are examined-taken to pieces. The eagle-eyed, argus-eyed world observes everything we do, and sharp critics are upon us. Let us live the life of Christ in public. Let us take care that we exhibit our Master, and not ourselves-so that we can say, "It is no longer I that live, but Christ that lives in me."
We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.
It's a social contract we make. We're willing to give up certain things. We give you the right to tax us. We give you the right to lock us up. We give you the right to put us on surveillance, search our homes, whatever and, in exchange, we get a functioning society that keeps us relatively safe, and that's the tradeoff we make.
For years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?
When something goes wrong in our lives we often ask ourselves "Who was present?" and if there was ever a singular person that was present in whatever the event was when something changed our lives. If we can't get beyond that event, we become obsessed with it or it changed our life in a way that we can't make sense of. We often seek out that person because that was the last time our lives made sense.
The choices that we make through our lives, the people who intersect us on our path kind of change what our fated destiny is. So some of us are lucky enough for the choices that we make to keep us on our path.
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