Loved by God.

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Chicago, IL, United States
* It's good to suffer loss, for it draws me to the Cross where God's loss is more than what anyone ever lost. * We cannot hear what the stories of the Bible are saying until we hear them as stories about ourselves. * Let go of control. * Trust God. Thank God. Think about God. Talk to God. Talk about God.

Saturday, October 4, 2025

Christians were Never Meant to be Normal. Extremism. Evil People.

“Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we've always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.”
Jacques Ellul. 1912-1994, died 82.
20th-century French social theorist and resistor against Nazi occupation.

“There is no need for us to try … to bring peace on earth. Instead, we ourselves must be peaceful. For where the peaceful are, there peace reigns.” Jacques Ellul, French philosopher, sociologist, theologian, Christian, describing himself as a "Christian anarchist." 

"The biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel GOOD because it provides you with enemies. Let me explain. A great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in the enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you.

Attractive, isn t it?..." John Cleese, 1987.

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"


During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: 'Know thyself!”