This is what Jesus gets to hear every day

Happy Valentines Day!


"Grace be with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with love incorruptible."
(Ephesians 6:24 ESV)

We are the Words of His Power

N.D.Wilson:

"Tree, I say, and you know what I mean. You see one in your mind, or glace out your window and remember the much-needed pruning. Tree, God says, and there is one. But He doesn't say the word tree; He says the tree itself. He needs no shortcut. He's not merely calling one into existence, though His voice creates. His voice is its existence. That thing in your yard, that mangy apple or towering spruce, that thing is not the referent of His word. It is His word and its referent. If He were to stop talking, it wouldn't be there. Or do you think that its molecules and atoms and quarks are made of some mysterious, self-sustaining matter that has always been and will always be, some infinite Play-Doh or hydrogen, holy be its name? Maybe there was an Adam Up Quark and an Eve Lepton? Maybe God found a bit of infinite matter and blew it up like a balloon, and now it sputters and spits while it swirls, sustaining itself?"

—> Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl (p. 43)

God, the least you could do is spell it out!

N.D.Wilson:

"There are Christians in the world who bemoan the absence of God's speech, who cry out for personal communication with God Himself. They want cues for their lines. They want explanations and specific directions from the Artist.

And God, as far as they can tell, is ignoring them. They feel neglected—because they weren't cast as Moses or Elijah or Enoch or Gideon.

Tell me what you want me to do, God. Speak to me (in English, please) and tell me if I should take this job in Des Moines or stay closer to my mother.

Then, because their part in this story does not include cosmic voice-overs in English, they enter into an existential crisis. They begin to 'doubt.'"

—> Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl (p. 30)

Poetry for dudes

N.D.Wilson:

"How many quarks are out there, splashing around in this storm? How many vowels are in a hurricane? This wet strength, so enormous beside our small arms, is itself only a tiny corner of the spoken world, a tiny corner of this poem. Bigger breakers swirl in Jupiter's eye, but who sees them? Stars and worlds twist in solar storms. This storm is nothing, and I am less. But to an infinite artist, a Creator in love with his craft, there is no unimportant corner, there is no thrown-away image, no tattered thread in the novel left untied.

This ocean, tiny in the universe, is here because it's beautiful. This word, these words that keep surging and crashing and grinding against the contrast of the cliffs, they are strong and guttural, like the taste of Anglo-Saxon. This is poetry, but it is not delicate and fragile, a placid ocean beneath a Bible verse on an inspirational poster.

This poetry has testicles. It's rougher than rodeo. Which is why the cliffs are crowded with spectators."

-Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl (p. 29)

No answers allowed, I'd be out of a job

N.D.Wilson:

"What is the world? What kind of place is it? What is it doing? Why is it here? How do we know? The questions are fine. Sophia is the goddess of wisdom. Philosophia—the brotherly love of wisdom—is a perfectly clean pastime for boys and girls alike. But philosophy proper has become a place to hide, a place to pursue immortality (through never going out of print) by being foggy enough that room is always left for discussion—for dissertations.

Huzzah for questions. Nobody reasonable dislikes them in moderation. But does anyone actually want answers? Is the journey the destination? Please, no. Let me out of your Volkswagen bus at the next corner. Would a successful answer constitute failure? If you knew the meaning of life, would you necessarily like it?" 

-Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl (p. 16)

A philosophy that tabernacles among us

N.D.Wilson:

Second, we don't just feel the need to explain and justify existence, we also seem to understand that our explanation needs to be as outlandish as ourselves, as impossible as reality. This is no time for dogs eating homework. This requires some serious imaginative effort. Personable dragons, wind-inflated worlds and carcasses, dying wolves, cosmic blood, divine urine, exploding gas, and an ever-expanding universe—pick your cast of characters and create your own mythology. Explain yourself. Justify your presence here, the presence of the world. Even harder, explain the world's personality. Find a single seed to account for it all. Sit by a campfire, or in a college lab, and spin your tale. Compete with the choir of old stories. Sign up devotees and acolytes. Sculpt yourself something our of clay, add some odd anatomical detail, and convince yourself that it needs a bowl of fruit, or a goat, or maybe the volcano needs a virgin, or Zeus needs a shepherd girl (again). Or get a degree in philosophy, and ride that Ferris wheel. Look down at the Carnival, be safely above our madly spinning world, the mountains, thunderheads, birthing lightning while they roll, the smell of lawn clippings and fresh-cut cedar. Hide behind big words, or listen to a child's first laugh and know that this world is here, that you are in it, and that its flavors are deep and layered and its lights are bright. Know that it's real.

-Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl (p. 7)

"Rightly Directed Rage"

Dane Ortlund, on Penn State:

"What Jerry Sandusky did was a horror. If that was my boy who came home with wet hair, and had been brutalized in that way, I am not confident that I would be able to restrain myself from calmly killing Sandusky in the middle of the night. Slowly. I am not trying to be funny. If that were my son--God help him.

Now--brothers and sisters--that horror we feel is right. The thirst for personally executed revenge is not right. But the revulsion, and thirst for justice, is right. We would be wrong not to feel it.

But the horror we feel over this is not only appropriate, it is also a glimpse into the horror of our own sin. I am not leveling out all sins. Some are worse than others. But the revulsion, the rage, that we rightly feel toward that sick man is a picture of the repulsiveness of our own sick rebellion against an infinitely beautiful One, and the rage he would be right to direct toward us.
That desire for an hour, just one hour, with Sandusky in a sealed off room with nowhere for him to run, and the rage that I would like to pour out on him, is a glimmer of the rage that ought to be poured out on me by my Creator. And was poured out on his Son.
I am more like Sandusky than different from him.

God help me.

He did."

And maybe the best kinds of drugs...

"What excuses can I possibly make for this book?
Alcohol was not directly involved. I do not (to my knowledge) have a diseased brain. I've never used drugs. But that's not entirely true. Spring is a drug to me. So is Christmas. Love, poetry, wind, smells, lightning, children, ants, very small beetles—all drugs in their own way.

- from the first page of N.D. Wilson's Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl

God's longings are greater than ours

The one most eager for the Resurrection:

“We look forward to the day of incorruption; but not so earnestly nor so sincerely as God himself. It is on resurrection that his heart is set; and not an hour longer than is absolutely needful shall that glorious consummation be delayed. The Church desires it; this body groans for it; all creation longs for it; but God still more than all.

His object is not to perpetuate—but to terminate the reign of death; through death to destroy him that has the power of death. His purpose is to abolish death, to bind Satan, and to give his saints glorified bodies, and introduce the new heavens and new earth, wherein dwells righteousness.”

— Horatius Bonar
"The Mortal and the Immortal" (via Of First Importance)

"Nobody moved it— it just appeared there!"

Doug Wilson:

"We are called to the duty of work and not to the duty of predicting results. The Hebrew word for chance here (pega) does not refer to philisophical randomness, but simply means 'occurrence.' The event is not planned by us. As far as we are concerned, anything can happen.

To say that things happen by 'chance,' if we are using anything other than a figure of speech, is to be theologically and philosophically incoherent. Everything that happens is caused by something; the Bible teaches that it is caused by Someone. To say that something happens by chance is simply to confess our ignorance of the cause. 

We want to have a measure of control; we want to be setting the odds ourselves. But Solomon knows that the results are not predictable by any of those who live under the sun. "Who would have thought...?" The results of all our endeavors are completely in the hands of God."

Joy at the End of the Tether (p. 96)