Tony Snow: As He Lay Dying

Posted by guest blogger BroKen via the Good Doctor through Vanderleun:

God relishes surprise. We want lives of simple, predictable ease,- smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see…. but God likes to go off-road. He provokes us with twists and turns. He places us in predicaments that seem to defy our endurance; and comprehension - and yet don’t. By His love and grace, we persevere. The challenges that make our hearts leap and stomachs churn invariably strengthen our faith and grant measures of wisdom and joy we would not experience otherwise.

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The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change. You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft. Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But it also draws you into a world shorn of fearful caution. The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies.

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There’s nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue, - for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the most we ever could do.

Go read it all. Go now!

Comments

[Locutisprime]

If that doesn't put things in perspective....I don't know what does. thanks for sharing that. What an inspiration.

[Rick]

Excellent piece Ken... thanks for bringing it to our attention here...

I especially enjoyed The Doctor's closing comments:

Contrast this with the chatter of our age: the hollow arrogance of the neo-atheist; the mindless and irrational contradictions of the postmodern professor; the decadence devoid of dignity and grace in Hollywood’s finest; the flapping frivolity of the fawning and feckless media.

It is no small irony that the things of life grow clearest in the looming shadow of death; that for those who grasp these deeper things — glimpsed only in part, hoped for in faith rather than seen with the flesh — that the darkness of death casts sharp relief on the very essence and meaning of life.

[Mommynator]

Mr. Snow, consistent with his attained wisdom, has put into words what I have always thought and believed about these hardships thrown into our paths that envelop us, but was never able to find the words to express.

Thanks for posting this.