Things I Learned And Wrote At Age 31

• Belief is superior to knowledge in this: knowledge is limited; belief is unlimited.

• It is impossible to know what will happen in the future.  But it is possible to know what won't happen.

• To love someone truly is to love the nothingness of the person.

• The only way to persuade someone effectively is through careful preservation of their dignity.

• "Part of the reason you're alive is because you are dying all the time."
• If your cells don't die, that's called cancer.  So, life is really a balance between generation and mortification.

• A good man needs to have faith in his own ignorance.
• It's hard to believe you're capable of the same errors you see in others when you don't see them in yourself, but if you don't acknowledge your likeliness to be guilty of them, you have no hope of avoiding them.

• Constraint is necessary for freedom.
• A man floating in space has freedom but no constraint - no ability to accomplish anything, because he needs something outside of himself off of which to push.

• Humility is the receptacle for blessing.

• Anytime you get to know someone and feel strong affinity for them, you are learning a little bit of what God feels for them.

• Non-theistically speaking, you have two duties:
1. Fix what's inside of you
2. Give that to the world

• Make sure you have more charity than knowledge.
• And make sure you have much knowledge.

• Differences between a covenant and a contract:
1. A covenant is sacred.  A contract is secular.
2. A covenant is permanent.  A contract is temporary.
3. A covenant is motivated by love.  A contract is motivated by money.
4. A covenant seeks the welfare of the other.  A contract seeks the welfare of oneself.

• There are two credit card scores that show financial responsibility: 800 and 0.

• Saying faith is how you obtain things from God is like saying conversation is how a wife obtains things from her husband.

• Your appetites can change who you are.
• (And you can train your appetites)

• The more you take a burden upon your heart, the less it is a burden upon your shoulders.

• Life is an outdoor activity.

• Love controls emotions, not vice versa.
• Causality is a subset of control.

• When you say you want a spouse who makes you better, you are asking for an outright attack on the person you are by the person you love the most in the world, because by definition, becoming better means losing parts of who you are.

• There is no upper limit to how good you should be.
• Applying the phrase "good enough" to people is not good enough.

• When the sun is highest in the sky, shadows are at their least.  So, when the source of all goodness and light is lifted highest, all wrong and detriment are maximally diminished.

• When we are in the darkest places, we think God isn't hearing us, but it is just the opposite.  We are not hearing God.

• In marriage, it's never an issue that's the issue.  It's the expectation.

• Never follow an apology with, "It's just that..."  It undermines everything you just said.

• The proper way to go through life is to hold all you have with an open hand, i.e. expecting it to be taken from you.

• The greatest sign that God is a gentleman is that if your opinion clashes with His, He lets you have your way.
• One of the greatest opponents to "your way" is your wellbeing.  Since God is always on that side, His wants will occasionally clash with yours.

• The cross symbolizes the vertical connection we have to God and the horizontal one we have to mankind.

• The shallowest love is one word removed from the deepest love:
• They know me, so they love me vs. they know me, yet they love me.

• The great lamentable truth about mainstream Christianity today is that they will never say there are some things a Christian doesn't do.

• Your conscience doesn't actually judge the weight of your actions.  It can only judge your motives.
• Because of that, we tend to judge ourselves lighter than we should, since we haven't perceived our own effects.

• It is with snow globes as with life's problems: when agitation stirs up a mess, the solution is to sit still.  Further action only exacerbates the chaos.

• Putting your own hand to life's problems: positive immediate effect; rapid downturn.
  

         Putting life's problems in God's hands: negative immediate effect; massive recovery.

• Trusting God is the same as an investment.  It yields short-term loss and long-term success.

• Unbelief is the seed, and complaint is the water.
• Faith is the seed, and praise is the water.

• If it's true that your emotionalism can make you believe you have faith when you don't, it's also true that emotionalism can make you believe you have no faith when you do.

• Joy is said to be a fruit of the spirit.
• Happiness is the pericarp of joy.
• Feeling happiness is the exocarp.
• Causing happiness is the mesocarp.
• Understanding happiness is the endocarp.
• Sorrow is the seed.

• All of science is truth.  But science is not all of truth.

• The thing that gives life must be delivered through the thing that kills.

• Don't ask God why.  Ask what.

• If your religion costs you nothing, it is worth nothing.

• Your sensitivity to one's voice shows how great your love for them is.

• We're all only one negligible step up from infinitely ignorant.

• A prayer answered increases faith. A prayer unanswered increases patience.
• God always gives you the one you need.

• Malevolence is a form of art.

• You can't spell "bother" without "both."

• The two great pathologies of life are chaos and order.  Chaos is the naturally occurring one, and order is the humanly constructed one.  Each is the antithetical response to the other.
• The human role is to balance chaos using order while giving in to neither extreme.

• You can get what you want, but you'll lose what you have.

• Verbal astuteness is the most superficial kind of smart.

• Faith in God is to rely on Him exactly the same when you have resource and recourse as when you don’t.

• The circuit of the soul (which is comprised of the heart and mind):
• The ears and eyes are the double doors to the mind
• The mind is the entrance to the heart
• The mouth is the exit from the heart

• The great folly of atheism is the unconscious, hypocritical borrowing of the ethos of theism.
• Ethics have no standing in atheism but are needed for society to function.