Pensées: 2025

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

Well, here’s a wrap for 2025. I didn’t get to post anything substantial last year post-January. I won’t get to again until I submit my PhD thesis in the next couple-to-few months, hopefully. Still, stray thoughts kept coming. These few stayed (mostly from Sundays):

1. (Pun and games, ##1–8) Why were Jesus’ disciples first called “Christians” at Antioch? Because “Jesusites” just didn’t have the same ring.
2. Don’t mind me. I’m just taking my sweat time.
3. “‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, And grit won’t get me home.” (~ “Amazing Grace”)
4. Many duties that are a bore and chore become a bear when you don’t care.
5. “Do you struggle with writer’s block?” That’s a question I get (I guess because my PhD is “taking so long”). Then I get to daydreaming, Writer’s block? What’s that?? Sounds handy. I sure don’t struggle with one. I wish I knew where to find a writer’s block. Maybe I could get a bunch and use them to blockade the rush of thoughts that come through my head and threaten to … Aaah!!!! Someone help me! Hand me a block—quick!
6. I’m not the athlete I used to be since I entered academia. My brain gets all the exercise, not my backside. Oh well. Studious maximus.
7. Some God calls some to himself. Others he hauls.
8. Power tripping makes for good face planting.
9. (Pastoring, ##9–16) High places hang on longest. (~ 1 Kgs 15:14; 22:43; 2 Kgs 12:3; 14:4; 15:4, 35)
10. In suffering, you often can’t distinguish between death pangs and growing pains.
11. Most pastors don’t give in to adultery though premeditated excesses but by not guarding themselves in their everyday affairs.
12. When all you can do is pray, it proves what all God can do.
13. As a shepherd of souls, if you don’t correct the sin that you do see, soon you won’t see the sins you should’ve corrected. (~ Gregory the Great, Book of Pastoral Rule 3.4)
14. If workers be few, and I’m of them too, God help me stay true.
15. People need room to grow. The questions to ask are, Are you giving people room to grow or sin room to grow? Are you freeing others to learn what they don’t yet know or enabling them to avoid when they know better?
16. Dealing with terminal diagnoses is like running a race without knowing if it’s a sprint or a marathon.
17. (Sanctification and the Christian life, ##17–26) Every saint’s a servant. You’re not a saint because you serve. You serve because you’re a saint. (~ Ephesians 4:12; 1 Corinthians 12:4–7)
18. Scripture doesn’t command us to fight our sin but slay it.
19. Too many hearers of the word think becoming a talker of the word makes you a doer of the word. It don’t.
20. Jesus’ friends are in the know and practice what he preaches. (~ John 15:13–15)
21. Everything you do is in vain when you’re vain.
22. As we sanctify the Sabbath, God sanctifies us.
23. God doesn’t want us only to share a link. He wants us to show with our lives. (~ John Snyder)
24. Long by love to live in light.
25. Time and time again, God’s chosen to use a few who stay true.
26. My hopefulness isn’t based on how this world’s going to end. It’s based on the fact that the next world already began.
27. (Worldview and review, ##27–40) Questions are compatible with Christian faith so long as they propel you to—not plague you from—God in Scripture.
28. To author is to exercise authority. That’s why, when people disdain the Scriptures God authored, they shirk his authority.
29. Regarding the knowledge of God, better to limp in the light of Scripture than to run to ruin without it. (~ Calvin, Institutes 1.6.3)
30. What’s so special about the Bible? The Bible is like every other book, but no other book is like the Bible.
31. In religion and spirituality, anyone with something important to say has little new to say.
32. To live traditionally in today’s culture, you have to think independently from the culture. How ironic.
33. You can’t walk the narrow path without being narrow minded.
34. Perspective isn’t everything, but without it nothing’s realistic.
35. If it’s go big or go home, going big only makes sense when you don’t have a home to go home to.
36. Miracles aren’t nature’s exceptions to the rule. They’re exceptions to how God normally rules over nature. (~ Calvin, Institutes 1.16.7; similarly 1.16.2)
37. You pay dearly if you speak freely. Free speech is always costly, whether you speak truth, lies, or folly.
38. I believe in brainwashing (Hebrews 9:14; 10:22). So do you, whether you enroll your children in public education or not.
39. My preferred pronoun: “y’all” (when addressing a group of two or more people; apostrophe between the <y> and <all> please, not <ya> and <ll>).
40. My critique of evolution is simple and incontrovertible: moms don’t have eight arms.

Until next year, deo volente,

Kyle

~ Carpe Deum! (‘Grasp God!’)