God stoops to our fears

On preaching 1 Samuel 16:1-13

...don’t you see what point II [God stoops to our fears] tells you about God? These little, scrawny verses, this mere conversation between God and his prophet? See how God takes notice of and addresses Samuel’s fears? He does not mock or ridicule him or tell him he’d never make a decent rugby player. He doesn’t jeer at him for trembling before Saul’s sword (cf. Psalm 103:14). Is he not the same God with us? Does he not understand what terrifies us? Perhaps the fear that we’ll not be saved at the last because we have no assurance of salvation now? Or are you alone in the world and wonder who is going to care for you when darker days come? Though you are one of Christ’s flock, do you have a terror of dying? Have you a spouse who is abandoning you and you can’t imagine how you will get on? Do you see Samuel’s God? He does not despise you in your fears but stoops down to meet you in them.

Dale Ralph Davis in The Word Made Fresh, page 124

The artist

I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually - like this today. The word craftsmanship takes care of the work angle & the word aesthetic the truth angle. Angle. It will be a life struggle with no consummation. When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle. All our lives are consumed in possessing struggle but only when the struggle is cherished & directed to a final consummation outside of this life is it of any value. I want to be the best artist it is possible for me to be, under God.
....Dear God please help me to be an artists, please let it lead to You.

From Flannery O'Connor's A Prayer Journal, page 29

Loneliness

The roots of loneliness are very deep and cannot be touched by optimistic advertisement, substitute love images or social togetherness. They find their food in the suspicion that there is no one who cares and offers love without conditions, and no place where we can be vulnerable without being used.

Henri Nouwen
Reaching Out

Change and security

In human beings there is a constant tension between order and disorder, connectedness and loneliness, evolution and revolution, security and insecurity. Our universe is constantly evolving: the old order gives way to a new order and this in its turn crumbles when the next order appears. It is no different in our lives in the movement from birth to death.

Change of one sort or another is the essence of life… when we try to prevent the forward movement of life, we may succeed for a while… but inevitably there is an explosion..

And so empires of ideas, as well as empires of wealth and power, come and go. To live well is to observe in today’s apparent order the tiny anomalies that are the seeds of change, the harbingers of the order of tomorrow. This means living in a state of a certain insecurity, in anguish and loneliness, which, at its best, can push us towards the new. Too much security and the refusal to evolve, to embrace change, leads to a kind of death. Too much insecurity, however, can also mean death. To be human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into insecurity and seeming disorder. In this way we discover the new.

From Jean Vanier's Becoming Human, chapter 1 (Loneliness)

Andrew Wyeth

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future -- the timelessness of the rocks and the hills -- all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

Andrew Wyeth
“Andrew Wyeth: An Interview” by Richard Meryman
in LIFE Magazine (May 14, 1965)