Pensées: 2022 to 2024

(Photo from cover page of Pascal’s Pensées at https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=G1hpAAAAcAAJ&pg=GBS.PP6&hl=en)

A more accurate and original yet less eloquent label for this collection might be, Stray thoughts that I had to write down, lest they distract me from other things that demanded my attention. So, I settled for pensées (#Blaise-Pascal).

Initially, these thoughts were written in a notepad haphazardly with the intent to develop them in ongoing writing projects. As I don’t realistically have time to develop most of these content-starters, I decided last year I’d organise and edit them slightly, type up my backlog, paste it here, and start a new note for 2025. Happy New Year!

(I couldn’t insert headings without interrupting the numbering: #1–10 “Pun and games”; #11–26 “Pastoring”; and #27–60 “Worldview and review.”)

1. (Pun and games, #1–10) Don’t stoop to stupid.
2. Interruptions towards the end of a gripping read are like interruptions mid-yawn and -stretch: the perfect moment gone, you settle for the next time.
3. Shooting the breeze is like boxing the air. Why bother with either?
4. When autocorrect fails, thank God for gynocorrect.
5. “New hormones won’t change my bones but lies will always please me.” (~ “Sticks and Stones”)
6. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, why don’t you use a picture to express it?
7. Don’t judge books by their covers. Judge people by their books.
8. Why is the pen mightier than the sword? The sword can only silence. The pen can also speak.
9. With gall, anything is possible.
10. We walk by faith and by scribes.
11. (Pastoring, #11–26) Pastoral ministry is always ten things at a time, one step at a time.
12. Pour into the core and feed the crowd when they come.
13. I pray I’ll never know the number of the flock I pastor but always know their names.
14. I did not appreciate how lovely my hometown was or how excellent Mom’s cooking until I left. Both benefitted me despite my ingratitude. How can I serve others less than I’m capable if I ever feel unappreciated?
15. Don’t think, If I only had that prosperous pastor’s advantages, what more I could do! Think rather, If a godly pastor had only my opportunities, what more would he do?
16. Preaching can never just fill a space in worship. It must create space for worship.
17. God assists whom he appoints. Whom he assists, he approves. (~ 1 Timothy 1:12–13)
18. Perseverance in ministry can easily deteriorate from joyful submission to God to prideful self-reliance.
19. Don’t ever think yourself so important that God can’t put you where he wants; do with you however he wants; or do away with you when he wants.
20. What’s easily puffed up is quickly deflated. What’s arduously built up can’t be easily defeated. (~ Galatians 5:13–26)
21. Faithfulness is never wastefulness. (~ Inspired by a quote about how the world views as “waste” what Christians deem “sacrifice.”)
22. Hell itself and all Satan’s might can’t destroy a church from without. Sin in the camp can. Besieged by evil, a congregation will starve from within if unfed by the word and parched without waters of life.
23. Jesus loved the marginalized to lead them to the center.
24. I hope to God I’d lose my mind before losing heart.
25. Why would anyone want you to preach about forgiveness instead of preaching against sin? So you can share the good news that Jesus will forgive people for all the sins they didn’t commit?
26. Emend your opinions as you please. Convictions are concrete. Based on God’s word, they shouldn’t budge unless God moves those mountains.
27. (Worldview and review, #27–60) What ticks you off makes you tick.
28. Where our mind wanders reveals what we worship.
29. Name-calling in argumentation reveals the need of an emotional substitute for substance.
30. A summary of Christian ethics by the means, motives, model, objects, and gradations of love: By, because of, and like Christ, love your enemy; your neighbour as yourself; your brother better than yourself; and God above all.
31. A martyr loses his life in a cause he believes greater than himself. A man with a martyr complex loses his life in a cause he believes less than himself. Both suffer. One is a fool. The other suffers gladly.
32. More deadly than a heart murmur is when our hearts murmur. The latter is contagious and easily conflagrates into mass murmur.
33. I’d gladly admit I was wrong to be right.
34. I’d be a novice in the truth before a veteran in falsehood any day. Better inexperienced but redeemed.
35. The gospel is the truth, love it or loathe it. It’ll scandalize or set you free.
36. People need community like plants the sun: lacking light, they wither.
37. Etch eternity on my mind, O God, no less than you’ve housed it in my heart. (~ Ecclesiastes 3:11)
38. Jews pray to Jerusalem and Muslims to Mecca. We Christians pray to the King above creation.
39. Speak a fairer language than the children of earth. Let it ring strange on their untuned ears. Obtain fluency in the celestial tongue.
40. In the Lord’s Prayer, the request for daily bread initiates our personal requests. How significant is this for how we think about ministering?
41. By our practice of focusing on material needs in “missions,” how much of others’ expectation for foreigners to give derives from Christians particularly?
42. In response to the pseud0-Christian sentimentalism I’ve heard since childhood about the deceased “smiling down on us” from heaven, I wrote this haiku that I’d want communicated in the case of my death (from which perspective it’s written):
    • Dead, God’s face I see.
    • Now I’m smiling, but not “down.”
    • Look to him, past me.
43. So often distractions are our duties. Distract me with yourself, O God!
44. Clinging to the faith of the fathers solely for the sake of tradition makes the hereditary heretical.
45. Everything that’s not of God will die with man. (~ 1 John 2:17)
46. Carry your cross until your cross carries you.
47. If someone can steal your peace, God didn’t give it. (~ John 14:27)
48. If you won’t own your sin, the Saviour won’t own you.
49. The Christian life isn’t about pushing boundaries but staying the course.
50. In Christ, you don’t have to be somebody. You are somebody. Now you have to do something.
51. Only when you live for God do you begin to live at all.
52. If all you’ve got left is Christ, you’ve still got it all.
53. The way of Jesus isn’t passive-aggressive but active-corrective.
54. You can’t have it all. Might as well have children.
55. Children are God’s greatest gifts to us as parents. May they be our greatest gift for the world.
56. Young children are mini, magnifying mirrors of their parents: they reflect your strengths and sins without constraint.
57. Be godly, my child. Then you can be anything.
58. God’s best gifts in life are oblique to himself.
59. When you depend on Babylon the Whore for your cause, sooner than later she’ll expect you to donate to her cause.
60. There’d be no natural without the supernatural. “Natural” as a category begs a contrast. Apart from the supernatural, we’d have no basis for differentiating “natural” and “unnatural”; the latter would always be an extension or gradation of the former, with the labels being relative to your perspective at the point when you apply them. If there’s a natural, then there’s also a supernatural.

~ Carpe Deum! (‘Grasp God!’)