This second time I read a few chapters. They were longer than the others, but had a good story line throughout.
They talked about his experience going to one of the most ‘god-less’ schools in America and how refreshing it was. He talked about meeting people, talking to them, and engaging them in intellectual conversation. He told a few stories, then climaxed with the redemption of a good friend who had turned her back on God. It was a beautiful piece of the book and probably one of the sections I would agree with most.
Miller especially hit on the problem of Christians today who sit in their perfect Christian bubble and don’t live their life among real, thinking people. Christians have stopped thinking and smart people view them as ignorant because they have no apologetic.
It was hard to find specific quotes from the section that stood out to me because you must read it as a whole and that is too much for me to type tonight (and possibly illegal
). But at the end of my section, I found this portion to hit me. Might not hit you in the same way as I, but it certainly has caused me to think about what I love and what I do.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“And that’s the tricky thing about life, really, that the things we want most will kill us. Tony the Beat Poet read me this ancient scripture recently that talked about loving either darkness or loving light, and how hard it is to love light and how easy it is to love darkness. I think that is true. Ultimately, we do what we love to do. I like to think that I do things for the right reasons, but I don’t, I do things because I do or don’t love doing them. Because of sin, because I am self-addicted, living in the wreckage of the fall, my body, my heart, and my affections are prone to love things that kill me. Tony says Jesus gives us the ability to love the things we should love, the things of Heaven. Tony says that when people who follow Jesus love the right things, they help create God’s kingdom on earth, and that is something beautiful.
“I found myself trying to love the right things without God’s help, and it was impossible. I tried to go one week without thinking a negative thought about another human being, and I couldn’t do it. Before I tried that experiment, I thought I was a nice person, but after trying it, I realized I thought bad things about people all day long, and that, like Tony says, my natural desire was to love darkness.
“My answer to this dilemma was self-discipline. I figured I could just make myself do good things, think good thoughts about other people, but that was no easier than walking up to a complete stranger and falling in love with them. I could go through the motions for a while, but sooner or later my heart would testify to its true love: darkness. Then I would get up and try again. The cycle was dehumanizing.”
(page 77)
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(Sounded to me like Benjamin Franklin’s endeavors.)
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