Jonathan

“The world, knowing how all our real investments are beyond the grave, might expect us to be less concerned than other people who long for what is called Higher thought and tell us that 'death doesn't matter'; but we are not 'high minded', and we follow the One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus-not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in His eyes than in ours. The nature if which He had created as God, the nature of which He had assumed as Man, lay there before Him in his ignominy; a foul smell, food for worms. Though He was to revive it a moment later, He wept at the shame; if I may here quote a writer of my own communion, 'I am not so much afraid of death as ashamed of it.' And that brings us again to the paradox. Of all men, we hope most of death; yet nothing will reconcile us to-well, it's unnaturalness. We know that we were not made for it; we know how it crept into our destiny as an intruder; and we know that on one level it is an enemy already disarmed; but because we know that the natural level also is God's creation we cannot cease to fight against death which mars it, as against all those other blemishes upon it, against pain and poverty, barbarism and ignorance. Because we love something else more than this world we love even this world better than those who know no other.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics

“The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy tale or otherworld setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. It is the mark of a good fairy story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the 'turn' comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“I am skeptical of everything. But I'm willing to believe anything.”
― Michael S. Heiser

“I'm a decretal Calvinist. I'm a five-point Calvinist. I believe it all. I'm a black-coffee Calvinist. I'm a crawl-over-broken-glass Calvinist. I wake up in the morning and I say, 'Ah, Calvinism! Another day of Calvinism! Oh boy, oh boy!”
― Douglas Wilson