why i like chesterton (pt 6)

The past month has been 60-70 hour work weeks between regular life (music, Blood:Water Mission, family, church) and remodeling our utility room. Things always take longer than you intend. I'm so thankful to be done with it, and proud of all the work. Thanks to friends and family who helped along the way...typing from the desk of my new office area, and now our laundry is hidden in a closet, as well as a lot of storage for files and gear in a separate closet.

As I'm getting close to the end of Wisdom & Innocence: A Life of GK Chesterton by Joseph Pearce, another paragraph strikes:

on the past, present, and future

"We talk of people living in the past; and it is commonly applied to old people or old-fashioned people. But, in fact, we all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell. To live in the future is a contradiction in terms. The future is dead; in the perfectly definite sense that it is not alive. It has no nature, no form, no feature, no vaguest character of any kind except what we choose to project upon it from the past. People talk about the dead past; but the past is not in the least dead, in the sense in which the future is dead.

The past can move and excite us, the past can be loved and hated, the past consists largely of lives that can be considered in their completion; that is, literally in the fullness of life. But nobody knows anything about any living thing in the future, except what he chooses to make up, by his own imagination, out of what he regrets in the past or what he desires in the present." (439)

By the way, we're still anxiously awaiting the arrival of Sands #4, due Nov 22 and expected anytime!! We appreciate prayers for patience, strength, health, and rest as the days pass.