If the tomb is empty, despair does not get the final word.
Lord Jesus, meet us in the grief we cannot explain. Teach us to hope in your resurrection.
A reflection on 1 Corinthians 15:20–26.
@Athens_Stranger Knowledge without experience isn't real knowledge? But Thucydides is the cure for ignorance? Most of us who read Thucydides never lived through his war. We're learning from a book, which is knowledge without experience.
Yes, it’s easy to advocate for forgiveness when you’ve never personally faced a true enemy.
But that doesn’t make the advocate ignorant. You could say this about any virtue.
We urge courage on people who haven’t been shot at, and no one calls that ignorance.
C.S. Lewis called courage the form of every virtue at the testing point, but being unproven isn’t the same as being wrong, and it doesn’t make the virtue any less worth striving for.
For the endless talk of forgiveness on today’s timeline by most people whose knowledge of true enemies is a mere abstraction that lacks experience amid their lives of idle comfort:
Thucydides is the corrective for such ignorance
Peter denied knowing Jesus. The risen Jesus still entrusted him with caring for his sheep.
Bring your failure to Christ. Ask what faithfulness looks like today.
A reflection on John 18:15–27 and 21:15–19.
You can be sincere in prayer and still be speaking as an imaginary version of yourself to an imaginary version of God.
C.S. Lewis’s prayer:
“May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.”
Simone Weil linked attention to God with attention to the person suffering in front of you.
That gives prayer an uncomfortable test:
Are you becoming more available to the people whose needs inconvenience you?
“Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and don’t do the things which I say?”
Luke 6:46 · World English Bible
Read the house-building parable that follows. Ask God for one faithful action today.
“our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
Augustine, Confessions I.1
What are you asking success to give you that only God can give?
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