I was sick as a dog today. I came home from work early.
Isaac and I always watch Wheel of Fortune. It is part of our nightime routine. He doesn't want to go to bed until Vanna tells him "Bye." Anyway, I'm usually pretty good at figuring the puzzles out. Tonight I only figured out two. That means my head isn't working all that well. So I will not be able to think of any good religious thoughts for the day.
However, I decided to have a guest blogger today. I asked my good old friend Soren if he had anything else to say. Here is what he came up with.
One dare not say of repentance and remorse that it has its time; that there is a time to be carefree and a time to be prostrated in repentance. Such talk would be: to the anxious urgency of repentance - unpardonably slow; to the grieving after God - sacrilege; to what should be done this =very day, in this instant, in this moment of danger - senseless delay. For there is indeed danger. There is a danger that is called delusion. It is unable to check itself. It goes on and on: then it is called perdition. But there is a concerned guide, a knowing one, who attracts the attention of the wanderer, who calls out to him that he should take care. That guide is remorse. He is not so quick of foot as the idulgent imagination, which is the servant of desire. He is not so strongly built as the victorious intention. He comes on slowly afterwards. He grieves. But he is a sincere and faithful friend. If that guide's voice is never heard, then it is just because one is wandering along the way of perdition. For when the sick man who is wasting away from consumption believes himself to be in the best of health, his disease is at the most terrible point. If there were some one who early in life steeled his mind against all remorse and who actually carried it out, nevertheless remorse would come again if he were willing to repent even of this decision. So wonderful a power is remorse, so sincere is its friendship that to escape it entirely is the most terrible thing of all. A man can wish to slink away from many things in life, and he may even succeed, so that life's favored one can say in the last moment, "I slipped away from all the cares under which other men suffered." But if such a person wishes to bluster out of, to defy, or to slink away from remorse, alas, which is indeed the most terrible to say of him, that he failed, or - that he succeeeded?...
...The call of remorse is perhaps the best. For the eager traveler who travels lightly along the way does not, in this fashion, learn to know it as well as a wayfarer with a heavy burden. The one who merely strives to get on does not learn to know the way as well as the remorseful man. The eager traveler hurries forward to the new, to the nove, and, indeed, away from experience. But the remorseful one, who comes behind, laboriously gathers up experience...
...The indolent youth speaks of a long life that lies before him. The indolent old man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remores belong to the eternal in a man. And in this way each time that repentance comprehends guilt it understands that the eleventh hour has come: that hour which human indolence knows well enough exists and will come, when it is talked about in generalities, but not when it actually applies to the indolent one himself. For even the old man thinks that there is some time left and the indolent youth deceives himself when he thinks that difference in age is the determinig factor in regard to the nearness of the eleventh hour.
I will stop there, but I strongly recommend reading Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. So far, it has been a great book.
Watch out for the potholes.
