Stout Wisdom

God seems to have hidden holiness and wholeness in a secret place where only the humble will find it.

…beauty hurts. Suffering opens the channel through which all of Life flows and by which all creation breathes…

Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

GMC now offers a tailgate that flips fourteen different ways. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. I thought a tailgate was intended to keep things from falling out. GMC says it is a good place to rest your laptop. Kill me now.

The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.

Some people, not all of them dimwitted, ask the secret of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “communication skills.” Is it a heavy use of verbs? But what we are seeing isn’t “communication skills.” A brave man stands and tells you what he is doing—staying, fighting, leading. It’s straight and clear because he is, but also because he doesn’t have time for “eloquence.” Crisis is an editor, it removes the cheap and extraneous and keeps the essential. “I need ammunition, not a ride.” That’s not something clever you thought up, it’s the simple expression of a human predicament. And a universal one. At some point in your life you’ll have to stand and fight. You too will need ammo and not a ride.

We are all pilgrims. At some point you must trust life, trust God, and push off.

God did not change his mind about us on account of the cross or on any other account. He did not need to have his mind changed. He was never opposed to us. It is not his opposition to us but our opposition to him that had to be overcome.

Nothing irredeemable has happened to us or can happen to us.

Every system is perfect designed to get the results it gets.

The whole world is preserved, and every part of it keeps its place, by the will and decree of Him, whose power, above and below, is everywhere diffused. Though we live on bread, we must not ascribe the support of life to the power of bread, but to the secret kindness, by which God imparts to bread the quality of nourishing our bodies.

Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

We speak often and say nothing; God speaks once and utters eternal verities.

The best way out is always through.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.