John

“you’re mine two times over—I made you, and now I’ve bought you!” God made you, God created you, and He bought you at Golgotha with the blood of Jesus Christ. You are His, twice over! He has a claim on you. As the beloved Apostle Paul put it: “He are not your own for ye are bought with a price.” He has a right to everything you are and everything you have; to your mind, your soul, your tongue, your hands and feet, your talents, your capacities, your life, and above all, He claims your obedience, obedience in the receiving of His Last Supper, obedience in love, love for Him and for all men everywhere. Through His Church, those who rule it and those who compose it, “make it up,” He has a right to demand everything of you, even your life. There is nothing you may withhold from Him. So, remember Jesus Christ. He has a claim on you! But if you remembered only this, I couldn’t promise that your life would be great and wonderful. Indeed, it could become quite intolerable. For if you were only aware that God has a right to demand anything of you, anything at all, in the end you might become angry with Him for requiring so much. Or you might despair, of God first of all, but especially of yourself when”
― Roy Harrisville, Tell it on the Mountain: A Collection of Sermons

“The young don’t know that experience is a defeat and that we must lose everything in order to win a little knowledge.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“When you gaze a long while fixedly at the deep sky thoughts and feelings for some reason merge in a sense of loneliness. One begins to feel hopelessly solitary, and everything one used to look upon as near and akin becomes infinitely remote and valueless; the stars that have looked down from the sky thousands of years already, the mists and the incomprehensible sky itself, indifferent to the brief life of man, oppress the soul with their silence when one is left face to face with them and tries to grasp their significance. One is reminded of the solitude awaiting each one of us in the grave, and the reality of life seems awful . . . full of despair. . . .”
― Anton Chekhov, The Complete Short Novels

“While the Reconstruction struggle ensued in Washington and across the South, Edward A. Pollard, wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, wrote his long manifesto, The Lost Cause, published in 1867. Pollard issued a warning to all who would ever try to shape the memory of the Civil War, much less Reconstruction policy. “All that is left the South,” wrote Pollard, “is the war of ideas.” The war may have decided the “restoration of the union and the excision of slavery,” declared Pollard, “but the war did not decide Negro equality.”39 Reconstruction was at once a struggle over ideas, interests, and memory.”
― David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory