When somebody tells you your thinking is "all over the map", and that you're being self-contradictory, never rush to kowtow to their expectation, jump through their categorical hoops, parrot the terms that will gratify them, or (Heaven forbid) squelch and squash and squeeze and press your mind's workings into the mold guaranteed to incite no more objections. Never do that violence to your own soul, no matter how strident the demands from without. It is the path to dehumanization. It is a horror. It is the way of the mob and herd. And "mob and herd" there surely is on "both sides of the aisle", whichever of life's aisles it may be....
Does this mean "Be un-teachable"?
Good grief, it means anything but.
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(With a nod to Robert Frost)
Life (God) doesn't permit us to sketch the future and settle comfortably into our neatly traced design; His plan always upsets and surpasses, and (adding insult to injury) demands our whole heart.
But His is the only endgame, the one future, the single triumphant arrival.
And His is the grace to say, "You come too."
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It's not really so hard to expose (to ourselves) our core values, drives and desires; they daily determine and shape our reactions, relationships, and peace or absence thereof.
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The Spirit's work in us transcends feeling—and...
Because it does, our...
Surrender to Him...
Transcends feeling. And this...
Is shared triumph, the...
"Mutuality" of...
The Christ-Life:
"It is He who works in you both to will and to do...."
And the willing and the doing are ours, in Him.
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What we owe ourselves most is to have everything He intends for us, so as to be everything he intends to give through us.
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The way of sanctification inevitably entails encounter with the unholy; purification is necessarily a reckoning with the impure; never to be jolted by evil, whether within or without, means never to transcend it; to be driven by God to His holy will as yet unfillfilled is to be compelled to a holiness as yet unrealized. The becoming unfolds in the doing.
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Every divine prod, on and forward, is also an extraction from a place where, no matter how we love it now, it would be hopeless to stay. The bittersweet passing of chapters rolls inexorably into the salutary unfolding of his Own redeeming passage and motive.
