Stopping to Think

"If we leave our self-perception to ourselves, we will live lives of self-deception." Anthony Bradley Commonplace Monday is a series of posts wherein, on Monday mornings, I share short quips, sentences -perhaps as much as a paragraph- which I have collected in my various commonplace books and files. If I wrote down or recall where it came from I will certainly give attribution. However, sometimes I write down things and not where they came from. So if you see anything like that here and recognize it, that's what comment sections are for.  

Today marks my parents 27th anniversary. 27 years of commitment, 27 years of struggle, 27 years of life together. 27 years of good, bad, and everything in between. My parents are far from perfect (doesn't that go without saying, at least assuming that we have human parents?). But today I want to meditate and dwell on one thing that I have learned from my parents that has already served me well, and I pray will continue to do so. What is this one thing? That staying married is a matter of desiring to stay married. What do I mean? Well, there is a self-evident reality to this. Why do marriages, over half of them today, dissolve? Because one or both parties desire that they no longer wish to be yoked together. Now, my parents never sat down and explained this fact to me. But when you watch two people, who in very many ways are polar opposites in thought, opinion, personality, etc., and watch them disagree, be frustrated with one another, argue--many people in our society wo...

What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in it's time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.   - Ecclesiastes 3:9-11   I once watched an interview of Rod Dreher conducted by Eric Metaxas. The topic of this interview was Dreher's book, "The Little Way of Ruthie Leming"  (I subsequently read the book, which I commend to you). In the interview they explore the themes of the book, which examine's Dreher's growing up in a small Louisiana town, feeling out of place because of his intellectual proclivities, leaving the small town and living a somewhat nomadic big city life in search of place and meaning, and finding those things as he returned to that same small town. The catch in the story is what brings him back to the small town. His sister is diagnosed with s...