As the Hart News
An update post
Some six months ago, I committed to a bi-monthly schedule of posting to Substack. I believe credit for this idea goes to a publication called Pen2Profit, but cannot confirm this because older posts there are paywalled.
I wanted to get into some sort of rhythm with my writing, and imposing deadlines on one’s self was pitched as a way to get things finished—I was writing thousands of words but completing nothing. So I now have an event in my calendar that reads, “publish to Substack” and one of these events is on the fifteenth of May.
Obviously, this did not get published on the fifteenth of May, but I am consoled by the knowledge that real writers also overrun their deadlines. When trying to produce real writing, it is important to use every tool in the box, so I am pleased that I managed to incorporate the tool of tardiness.
Anyway, I did not get my May post completed in time to publish. I got close, but I now have an actual writing assignment to complete, with an actual deadline, and nothing ready to post here. In order to adhere (loosely) to my publishing schedule, I decided to link some posts below which I read and enjoyed in the last few months.
My wife sent me this post from To Sow a Seed, and it speaks to something that I have felt on occasion. There is something about trying to convince ourselves that we are good enough that seems counter productive. There seems to be a consensus from somewhere that our self esteem needs to be healthy. I obviously do not have room or time to elaborate here, but my suspicion is that this leads us to look for consolation in the wrong place. Inside ourselves perhaps. Anyway, I think this post raises a good point.
I like what Ross Byrd has to say about marriage.
He includes this C.S. Lewis quote,
Equality is a quantitative term, and therefore love often knows nothing of it;
which I find insightful. Striving for equality seems to me like an endless game of comparing ourselves among ourselves, something that we encourage our kids to avoid. Trading good deeds and trying to exactly split the work load in pursuit of equality seems like a rather dull sort of relationship, one that gets all caught up in weights and measures rather than any sort of genuine good will.
The quote that I find the most memorable though, is this one:
Religious skeptics complain about the absurdity of having a relationship with a God you cannot see. But the truth is that every human relationship is like this. Every human being is a spiritual being. We are mostly invisible to one another until we learn, over time, often by means of promissory love, to see each other rightly.
I may not understand what it means precisely, but it reminds me of something Ron Nash said in a lecture, which goes more or less as follows: “There are things that I cannot know about you unless you, and only you, reveal them to me.”1
I think these ideas do a good job of explaining the role of God’s revealed Word in our relationship with him. We cannot know him without it. But also, just because someone’s visage is familiar to us does not necessarily mean we know them. There is a something more that is significant, and this part of knowing each other is very similar to how we participate in a relationship with God.
And finally, Griffin Gooch, which he assures us is his real name. He’s also a real scholar with a real sense of humor who writes serious theology with a light touch. I cannot fathom how academics maintain momentum when digging through what has to be some incredibly boring material on their way to producing work this informative, but I am happy to benefit from it. This is my favorite of his posts to date.
That’s it! Enough yammering from me. Go read what these folks have to say.
I can narrow this down to one of seventy or so lectures, which are all available for free at
https://www.biblicaltraining.org