A Quote by Michel de Montaigne
We find ourselves more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile simplicities of our children, than we do, afterward, with their most complete actions; as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men.
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Freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. We have to fight for it and protect it and then hand it to them, so that they shall do the same, or we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.
If we desire to do what will please God, and what will help men, we presently find ourselves taken out of our narrow habits of thought and action; we find new elements of our nature called into activity; we are no longer running along a narrow track of selfish habit.
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
As soon as we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we know that our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism.
We don't think there's
something wrong with one-
year-old children because they
can't walk perfectly. They fall
down frequently, but we pick
them up, love them, bandage
them if necessary, and keep
working with them. Surely our
heavenly Father can do even
more for us than we do for our
children.
When our purpose is external, we may never find it. If we tie our purpose or meaning to our vocation, goal or an activity, we're more than likely setting ourselves up for suffering down the line.
We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery - it recharges by running.
So long as we insist upon defining our identities only in terms of our work, so long as we try to blind ourselves to the needs of our children and harden our hearts against them, we will continue to feel torn, dissatisfied, and exhausted…. The guilt we feel for neglecting our children is a byproduct of our love for them. It keeps us from straying too far from them, for too long. Their cry should be more compelling than the call from the office.
Let us first fulfill Christ's injunction ourselves and only then venture to expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies, and we have made them our enemies ourselves.
The deeper purpose of a more positive attitude toward men is a better life for the children who are parented by the men who are their dads and stepdads; less shame for our sons who will become men; and, for our daughters, a deeper understanding of men's desire to please that leaves them feeling their willingness to please is not unrequited but returned - allowing our daughters to feel less lonely and more loved. If we earn more and love less, we pay for a home in which we do not live.
Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible.
I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.
When all of our idols are taken away, all our securities and defense mechanisms,
we find out who we really are. We’re so little, so poor, so emptyand a shock to ourselves. But the Biblical God takes away our shame,
and we are eventually able to present ourselves in an honest and humble form.
Then we find out who we really are and who God is for usand it is more than enough. That is how an enslaved people became God’s people, Israel.
What would the world look like if we asked ourselves the following more often; are our actions helping others find a way to feel more freer, more dignified and more beautiful?
Anybody that has had a brush with what feels like undiluted evil often ends up asking themselves the same questions - whether it's something that was a consequence of their own actions or actions that were taken against them or actions that they were caught up in.
Our generation has taken to the cosmetic use of pesticides and I think, perhaps unwittingly, not fully understanding the dangers it represents to ourselves and, most importantly, to our children.
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