dual personalities

Today is St. Crispin’s Day and the 602nd anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt!

It is also two months until Christmas! Have you started planning for Christmas?

I have–just barely. But I have been thinking about it. This year, in addition to daughter #2 visiting, we will have her husband staying with us. Zut alors! We will also have grandchildren present for the first time. (Last year they were in the NICU.) And daughter #1 will be driving in from central MO, not jetting in from NYC, praying for good weather. Times change faster than the blink of an eye.

This all got me thinking about the passing of time, which sometimes can be a bit depressing. So here are a few thoughts to get you thinking as well.

“This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.”
―Martin Luther

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”
―Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.”
―Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Do you see yourself as a leaf blown by the wind or someone on the road and growing in righteousness? Or are you fishing and gazing at the sandy bottom?

Discuss among yourselves.