dual personalities

Month: January, 2025

January 3, 2025

Is it a Friday blog post if there are no pictures of Mr. Smith?

by chuckofish

But honestly, is it even Friday if I’ve been off of work for two weeks? Who is to say? Anyway, I thought I’d share this little bit from a commencement address given by Frederick Buechner at Princeton, on the 250th anniversary of the university’s founding. It feels apropos for the new year.

“‘What are you going to do now?’ was his question, and it is the question still, and it is also the question implicit in the Gospel reading for this first Sunday in June. Jesus has apparently spent the day teaching by the Sea of Galilee with the usual crowd gathered to hear him, but then evening comes and a kind of lull descends and with it the question of what they were going to do next.

Start for home maybe? Find a place to lie down and get some rest, sign off for the day, because God knows the day has been long and hard and nobody can keep going forever? But that is not what Jesus says though there can’t have been any of them readier to call it a day than he was, the star of the show. He is standing at the water’s edge with his tired fisherman friends, and what he says to them is, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ His answer to the question of what to do next, what to do with the rest of their lives, is simply stated. What he says to them is Go.

…

Keep going, Jesus says, beacsue to keep going is to keep living and to stop going is to stop living in any way that much matters. ‘Let us go across to the other side,’ he says, though who knows how far the other side is or what awaits us when we get there, if anything awaits us at all. And go bravely because if we are the boat and the storm and the fishermen in their helplessness, we are also, we have in us also, the holy one asleep in the stern with a pillow under his head whose presence gives us hope and courage.”

A new year awaits!

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January 2, 2025

Resolved

by chuckofish

Question 1
What is the chief end of man?
Man’ s chief end is to glorify God, (1 Cor. 10:31, Rom. 11:36) and to enjoy him for ever. (Ps. 73:25–28)

(Westminster Shorter Catechism)

Every January, in addition to catching up with the Westminster Shorter Catechism, I like to read through the Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards.

Resolved, that I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God’s glory, and my own good, profit and pleasure, in the whole of my duration, without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriad’s of ages hence. Resolved to do whatever I think to be my duty and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general. Resolved to do this, whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever.

There are a 70 of them. You can read them here. They are worth reading!

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January 1, 2025

My sinful soul is counted free

by chuckofish

It is a new year. Time to look forward. But it is also (and always) a good time to look back–especially to try and see where and how God has been working in your life. He is, you know. Every day, in 10,000 ways.

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

-Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember

And remember this?

Wonderful! “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.” (Also Frederick Buechner)

Happy New Year! Live in hope and embrace what God gives you in this life in love.

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