Suzanne DeWitt Hall's blog highlighting the idea of a theology of desire, featuring the writing of great minds along with her own humble efforts at exploring the hunger for God.
(Note: Most of this blog was written under Suzanne's nom de couer "Eva Korban David".)
Saturday, August 28, 2010
A quote which seems to fit this summer
Quote du jour, spoken recently by a pastor at a friend's church:
"If you aren't catching any fish, it might be time to clean your net."
As a son of Sweden, my eye was caught by Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, a novel of Swedish migration to this nation in the nineteenth century. He describes the landless, the debtbound, the discontented, the oppressed, confined to a centuries-old, unchanging pattern of life, hearing of a new land far away, a land opened invitingly, even temptingly, for those who longed for a freedom denied them at home. They were stirred. Eventually, one-fourth of all Swedes in the world lived not in Sweden but in America.
The emigrants knew little of the country awaiting them, but they risked everything and went. The enterprising, the bold, the courageous, the aggressive were dismissed as daredevils by some. But their groping, daring undertaking, ridiculed by the unimaginative, with every appearance of foolhardiness, gained for them a larger cultivated land than their entire homeland.
I wonder how many of us need to emigrate today. I mean, from ourselves and the lives we’ve been living for too long, with too little freshness, too little risk, too little thrill and way too much predictability and self-pity and unbelief and fruitless busyness. But check this out. Your life right now is usable in God’s hands for new things. Jesus said to some fishermen, “Come, follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people” (Mark 1:17).
2 comments:
As a son of Sweden, my eye was caught by Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, a novel of Swedish migration to this nation in the nineteenth century. He describes the landless, the debtbound, the discontented, the oppressed, confined to a centuries-old, unchanging pattern of life, hearing of a new land far away, a land opened invitingly, even temptingly, for those who longed for a freedom denied them at home. They were stirred. Eventually, one-fourth of all Swedes in the world lived not in Sweden but in America.
The emigrants knew little of the country awaiting them, but they risked everything and went. The enterprising, the bold, the courageous, the aggressive were dismissed as daredevils by some. But their groping, daring undertaking, ridiculed by the unimaginative, with every appearance of foolhardiness, gained for them a larger cultivated land than their entire homeland.
I wonder how many of us need to emigrate today. I mean, from ourselves and the lives we’ve been living for too long, with too little freshness, too little risk, too little thrill and way too much predictability and self-pity and unbelief and fruitless busyness. But check this out. Your life right now is usable in God’s hands for new things. Jesus said to some fishermen, “Come, follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people” (Mark 1:17).
Wow, thanks Ike. I sit on the eve of many new beginnings, of risk and unpredictability, and your words were His encouragement to me.
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