Many Americans have been trained to believe that feeling is a form of labor, perhaps the most meaningful, while practical help only fixes symptoms. When a child feels the natural impulse to give a panhandler money, we tell them, if we’re stupid, that he only wants it for drugs, or, if we’re slightly less stupid, we recite a certain platitude about men and fish. (It’s hard to pay attention to a fishing lesson if you’re starving, just as it’s hard to ace the ACT if you haven’t eaten or slept.")
Currently reading: The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis 📚
Oliver Burkeman, author of the superb Four Thousand Weeks, commenting on our misguided attempts to hoard our experiences:
The truth, of course, is that experiences are for having, not for hoarding. As J. Jennifer Matthews puts it, in her book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, “we cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life” to which you could take “life’s provisions and squirrel them away.” Spending your days trying to get experiences “under your belt”, in an effort to maximise your collection of experiences, or to feel more confident about the future supply of similar experiences, means placing yourself in a position from which you can never enjoy them fully, because there’s a different agenda at play.
“I’m getting a snack; do you want something?” my wife asks from the kitchen.
“No, I’m fine,” I reply. “I’ve got a candy cane.”
Currently reading: How to Be Normal by Phil Christman 📚
The ministry of the Word involves more than communicating a few truths; it involves transmitting a whole way of thinking and experiencing. Preaching and teaching should be “evangelistic,” then, in the sense of enabling people to indwell the gospel (= evangel) as the primary framework for all that they say and do.