Job 38 — what an electric chapter!

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?…

When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?…

Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail?…

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?

Our doctrine and practice makes God approachable.  That is good.

But the point of approaching him isn’t to make him our Buddy Jesus.  It’s to stand in awe of all that He is, from intimate familiarity with him.  Instead of holding his greatness beyond measure at a comfortable distance as some kind of murky abstraction.

In summer both rain and drought melt the snow.

An adult will spend their accumulated youth, whether in good or in evil.

Your sin becomes either misery or repentance.

One reason I believe our work on virtue sets is intellectually valid is because it is valid to my experience. It accurately reflects what has happened.

Mellow ambition, carefree hunger, easygoing striving, Type-A hippy, all sound like contradictions in terms. But it is a real thing. It isn’t just moderation between being happy go lucky and being a plucky goal guy. Its somehow capturing the good element in both at the same time and rejecting the bad element in both at the same time.

When I was in college there were guys who desperately wanted to get married and tried supremely hard and they got no where.

There were guys who were apathetic and they got nowhere.

Eventually you reached this state where you cared but didn’t care, where you were easygoing about the whole thing but also focused on your goal . . . and then you got married, often times through what seemed like purest happenstance. I half believe because being able to capture the virtues of being easygoing and being hungry at the same time is a conspicuous display of mastery. Very impressive.

Carefree —–> VIRTUE <—–  Ambition

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Most Tanner Greer is well worth reading, but I would elevate his latest to the top of the stack.

It’s not his most thorough or most scholarly piece, but it is on a topic that is incredibly important even for people who don’t care about current events and politics (which I hope for your sakes is most of you).

The piece is about stagnation. It’s real, and it has been going strong for decades. https://scholars-stage.org/has-technological-progress-stalled/ 

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Three crows were sitting on a fence.

The first crow said, “You should trust us.  We will always, always, tell you the truth.”

The second crow was surprised.  “We will?”

The third crow said, “What is truth?”

Moral: In a sense, you should trust the crows.

I dreamed that I was away for business.  Some kind of conference.  But I had to leave early for another conference in a small city about 60 or so miles south of where I work.  I flew out early in the morning and was going to be in that city for a day until the conference started bright and early the day.

I had planned to go to the historic library down town, which I’ve been too before.  But there was some special kind of food court that I and some other guys in the same boat–they were pretty glum about being stranded there for the day–decided to wander through first.  They had a booth dedicated entirely to chocolate-dipped strawberries.  They had a big counter dedicated to turtle soup.  And there was a Mexican place which wasn’t open yet that was also apparently dedicated to Mexican turtle dishes.

Then it occurred to me that I was close enough to home, I could just go home for the day.  So I did.