The Sun Rises Today, Again

The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.

The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.

It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

G.K. Chesterton

Joy

"All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves."

Blaise Pascal

The Lion of Judah

"Our own struggle makes us patient with others who are on the way. We believe that all the wrestling to understand what the Bible teaches about God is worth it. God is a rock of strength in a world of quicksand. To know him in his sovereignty is to become like an oak tree in the wind of adversity and confusion. And along with strength is sweetness and tenderness beyond imagination. The sovereign Lion of Judah is the sweet Lamb of God."

John Piper in "What We Believe About the Five Points of Calvinism"

Wisdom

"Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom."

Charles Spurgeon

Graduation 2011

Last Friday, I graduated! How do I even begin to talk about my past four years? These past four years have been the most intense four years I've yet to have spiritually, emotionally, mentally, familial-y, and the list goes on.

I came to USC with tons of hopes and ambitions, but deep down I knew that none of those hopes or ambitions meant anything without a proper context. I had an extremely shaky understanding of who I was and almost no real understanding of what I was living for. At the time, I was questioning almost everything I had grown up believing and wondered frequently if I was merely a product of indoctrination. I wondered if those things I had grown up believing were merely fanatical beliefs or if they were indeed firmly rooted truths and if they were the latter, where should I even begin to look to affirm those truths?

I think it was the longing to understand the deeper things of life that drew me to philosophy. As it turns out, I never found the answers to those deep things in my study of philosophy, but rather studying philosophy provided me a different mode of thinking and reasoning that helped me to filter what I let guide my life and my beliefs. I learned the importance of the Socratic insight to "follow wherever the argument leads you." I took a course in Reasoning & Logic that helped me to understand the basics of sound reasoning and logical thinking. I took several courses in Ethics that affirmed to me that there is something very unique about being human in regards to justice and fairness and that for since as long as humans have lived, there has never been an Ethical Theory that has been capable of ending injustice and human-induced suffering. Those things I learned in Ethics affirmed to me that sin is in fact a very real thing and no human institution nor amount of philosophical reasoning has ever been enough to eradicate the sinful nature.

The ever present amount of evil and suffering in our world and indeed even in my own life, helped me to see that if left alone to figure out the mess we've made as a species, we'd be utterly defeated.

In my biological coursework, I was given the unique insight to see and study the complexity of life at the micro-level. Each course, whether in chemistry or in physics, affirmed to me that the order of the universe could not have spontaneously arisen. The more I studied life at this level, the harder it became for me to deny some intelligent being back of it all.

God very much used my coursework to lead me to where I am today. I believe that what I've gained from my knowledge and experiences at USC was a gift from God, intended by him to shape me into the person I am. He gave me those opportunities and the knowledge as tools to know him more deeply and more truly.

I'm so thankful to God for these past four years. I cannot even begin to count the number of blessings and trials that led to blessings that the Lord provided me with. Above all else, I thank God for helping me to see the immeasurable worth of Christ, in whom, I now find all of my meaning and all of my purpose. There are so many things still lurking in my heart and still looming over my desires and ambitions that I know I have not yet given to the Lord, but again I thank God that even in my insufficiencies, Christ is all sufficient.

I thank God for the friends and family that he provided me with along the way. Only the Lord knows that I would never have made it through so many countless hours of studying into the late hours of the night without my friends and family. I thank God that he provided me with friends in whom I could confide in and learn from and grow with and that he gave me a family who has supported me since Day 1. When I began at USC, I thought that I could do it alone and all within my own strength, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Thank you Lord, for putting patient and loving individuals in my life, to help me to grow into the woman that you've called me to be.

Insanity

Lord, I want to be free. I want my desires so changed into accord with reality so that I can do what I want to do and never regret it. That's what I want. And so I'm going hard after Jesus to change me, because many of my desires are stupid.

It occurs to me to say, Father, that we Christians would be utterly insane to envy people who pitch themselves out of the window of sin—on top of a skyscraper—to enjoy a vapor's exhilaration of the freefall of greed, or the freefall of drugs, or power, or fame, or sex, or job success—and then death. We would just be insane to envy the world. Forgive us for our folly.

And right now I plead with you that everyone in the hearing of my voice would wake up from the dreamworld that says this kind of freefall is freedom. Catch us. Snatch us right now I pray.

And I pray this in the liberating name the one who said, "You will know the truth and truth shall you free. If the son shall set you free, you will be free indeed." Amen.

-John Piper

At the Cross, God's Love For Men Meets His Wrath Towards Sin

St. Augustine on the Cross:

God’s love is incomprehensible and unchangeable. For it was not after we were reconciled to him through the blood of his Son that he began to love us. Rather, he has loved us before the world was created, that we also might be his sons along with his only-begotten Son—before we became anything at all.

The fact that we were reconciled through Christ’s death must not be understood as if his Son reconciled us to him that he might now begin to love those whom he had hated. Rather, we have already been reconciled to him who loves us, with whom we were enemies on account of sin. The apostle will testify whether I am speaking the truth: ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’ [Rom. 5:8]. Therefore, he loved us even when we practiced enmity toward him and committed wickedness.

Thus in a marvelous and divine way he loved us even when he hated us. For he hated us for what we were that he had not made; yet because our wickedness had not entirely consumed his handiwork, he knew how, at the same time, to hate in each one of us what he had made, and to love what he had made.