“The ultimate mystery of personality—of personhood—is that no person exists for his or her own sake. As a matter of fact, it is precisely my own welfare that is the last thing in the world I am to be concerned with. Priests are to spend their days offering for others: the Good Shepherd gives his life for the sheep. The beholding, the loving—the adoration, if you will—of my own being is somebody else’s business, not mine.” Robert Capon

“Why is there so much trouble and difficulty in maintaining peace in the world? Think of all the endless international conferences that have been held in this present century to try to produce peace. Why have they all failed and why are we now coming to the state when very few of us seem to have any confidence in any conference that men may choose to hold? What is the explanation of all this? Why did the League of Nations fail? Why does the United Nations Organization seem to be failing? What is the matter? Now I suggest to you that there is only one adequate answer to that question; it is not political, it is not economic, it is not social. The answer once more is essentially and primarily theological and doctrinal.” Martyn Lloyd Jones c. 1959.

Robert farrar capon on dieting: “Dieting is wrong because it is not priestly. It is a way of using food without using it, of bringing it into your history without letting it get involved with your history. It is nonhistorical eating. And it is pure fraud. Bring it down to cases. Take an uncle with an embarrassingly low metabolic rate: if he gets more than 1,800 calories a day, his weight goes up out of control. He puts himself in the hands of dietary experts. They oblige him with a program. It works. At 900 calories per diem he becomes an up-to-date, low-budget uncle. But, if you see him in a year, he will have put it all back on again. And why? Because no sane human being can stand living on 1,800 calories every day till the clap of doom. So he nibbles away for a while, and then in desperation surrenders himself to creamed lobster, mashed potatoes, and a proper string of double scotches. He is lost, and he knows it. He just gives up. The only thing that can save him is historical eating—eating worthy of the priesthood of Adam—eating that alternates as it should between feast and fast. The dieter is a condemned man. Every feast is, ipso facto, a sin. He apologizes for eating my pâté; he abjectly acknowledges his guilt over my wife’s Cake à la Bennich. Good is evil to him, and bounty a burden. But if he would fast! If he would take no food on Wednesday—and none on Tuesday too, if he wills to reign like a king—what prodigies might he not perform at Thursday’s dinner; how, like a giant, go running from course to course?”

“Adam has got to be somebody’s grandfather—and Eve, somebody’s grandmother—or history is nonsense. The human race is precisely a web: times without number, good science has done nothing but confirm that. If I got my flat-footed walk or my love of caviare from my own grandfather, the case is closed. History is by that fact real; and all real things have beginnings. My grandfather himself had a grandfather. And if you rummage around long enough, somewhere in the web you are going to run into a fellow who had no human grandfather at all and who, therefore, is the real granddaddy of history. That gentleman is Adam.”

“You’ve never seen a Harley Davidson motorcycle in the parking lot of a psychiatrist’s office”

Robert farrar capon on taking up walking: ‘walking has turned out to have intellectual as well as physical benefits. I am as much the victim of placelessness, as much the prisoner of canned environment as the next person. It has, therefore, been a delightful and metaphysical surprise to be introduced to place again. I have, for example, rediscovered what a hill is. The automobile is the great leveler. It not only annihilates distances; it irons all the prominences and eminences out of the world.’ I can relate! I’ve ridden my wife 1500 miles in 2024, and have rediscovered what a hill is.

“Nobody can blame a corpse—especially not the corpse itself. Once dead, we are out from under all the blame-harrows and guilt-spreaders forever. We are free; and free above all from the messes we have made of our own lives. And if there is a God who can take the dead and, without a single condition of credit-worthiness or a single, pointless promise of reform, raise them up whole and forgiven, free for nothing—well, that would not only be wild and wonderful; it would be the single piece of Good News in a world drowning in an ocean of blame. It was not all up to me. It was never up to me at all. It was up to someone I could only trust and thank. It was salvation by grace through faith, not works.” Robert farrar capon

“life is what happens when you’re making other plans”

"Our deepest hungers are not physical; they are deeply spiritual. Our hearts growl with hunger for what was meant to be, for how the world was designed to be, for what we were created to be, for rescue from what was not meant to be." Paul Tripp

What was God doing before he created the world? Answer: Loving His Son. Father. . . you loved me before the foundation of the world. (John 17:24)

sirloin tip toast. crock pot 10 hours. mashed taters n gravy. why would i eat anything else?

Me? I want to be the kind of father that reads LOTR to the kids. i want to be the kind of husband that enjoys a bottle of wine with his wife…and the kind of man that pushes himself on the bike up the hill…and hosts others for dinner. And preaches christ. And sings loudly. — and trusts God every moment…and sits in the grass a lot…and thinks God’s thoughts after him, and enjoys getting older; and stretches, and doesn’t waste time doing stupid, trivial things. What kind of person do you want to be?

"The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth." Chesterton

To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you. (Philippians 3:1) “The lack of the presence of good things in our mind lays us open and makes us fit for all companies and occasions of sin.” (Richard Sibbes) Wonderful sentence. We must read Christ-exalting things non-stop. We must listen to truth non-stop, if we would avoid sin.

“It’s sad to watch someone continually look for something where it simply can’t be found. But we all do it. The deceptiveness of sin causes us to look horizontally for what will only ever be found vertically. We look to the creation to give us what only the Creator can. We try to turn people into little messiahs. We look to material things to supply spiritual needs. So we end up discouraged, disappointed, hurt, angry, sad, and without hope.” Paul Tripp

“A piece of cheese, a bottle of beer, and a twenty minute nap would solve more of the problems of industry, politics, and the church than all the pretentious martini-logged luncheon meetings in the world.” Robert Farrar Capon