Creative Limitation

• Robert Frost: writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
• Principles of Creative Limitation in STORY. By defining your genre, you can reach a higher intensity with LIMITS than complete freedom. "Genre conventions are the rhyme scheme of a storyteller's 'poem'" (91).

I know this principle of creative limitation isn't restricted to the art of storytelling, but bleeds into all realms of art, business, morality, and life.

Even in Middelmann's class, it's so interesting that all the modern philosophers were searching for freedom by creating an organized perception of reality. In the search for truth, the goal is freedom. It's just that complete liberation doesn't give people what they're searching for. I'm reminded of why my heart belongs to God. Besides being truthful, Christianity practically brings the freedom it ensures. It doesn't make lofty promises, but gives you an accurate perception of reality that allows you to live in the tension of brokenness and the inherent hope for Utopia.

Thank you God for limits. Help me know them well so I can live creatively, and wisely :)

Be.

Let the small-minded write,
Let the wise love,
The simple read,
And the captured hearts be.

Light.

It's like all my thought became bent on encountering it. To embark on this strange, awful journey. I didn't know what light would look like without my shadows. For years I wondered whether it was cool, gentle blue, or searing-red fire. No one could tell me, no matter who I asked or where I looked.

But the more I dreamed the less it mattered. I was made weary by activity, driven to solitude--where it fell upon me. I heard it again. Felt it. Believed it. Wanted it. Missed it. Knew I needed it.

Zoe Life: It is God Who is Working in You

C.S. Lewis says the height of what we know here is biological life: the ability to feel emotion, think, reason, and imagine all included. But what we are incapable of enacting on our own is a different sort of life-the life that is found in God-which he gives the name zoe. When Jesus bridges that gap separating us from the source of all goodness and life, God calls us his children, and invites us to participate in this new kind of spiritual life.

The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentance. The first half is, 'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling'--which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, 'For it is God who worketh in you' (122 Mere Christianity).

"I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes" (123 Mere Christianity).

"Handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because he has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of heaven is already inside you" (121).



Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Fluctuating Lordships: Efficiency, Beauty, and Christ.

Last year I was caught in an epistemological crisis concerning the nature of truth, and (after serious life episodes of awfulness) I came to the light at the end of the tunnel in ...september? Yes.

(sigh) well, I guess you can never get too comfortable. Now I'm having an epistemological crisis on the nature of beauty, and its once again insisting that I not just live, but live in pursuit of how to live.

Here's the thing: For the past 2 or 3 years I functioned under the lordship of efficiency. All of my life was neatly placed around that highest value. My hope was in one day reaching the apotheosis of productivity. Looking back--what a weird ultimate desire. Thank god God wanted me enough, loved me enough, to teach me it wasn't what I really wanted.

Suffering facilitates significant changes in our value-systems and general ideas about God and reality. Well, I've been changed to something better but...I'm not sure if its the best. Hence, my proclivity to wonder. I'm getting the feeling that life is going to continue in this pattern for as long as life is something I do.

NOW I function under the lordship of beauty. And, like efficiency, it works to an extent but I'm not totally satisfied. So all of my life is placed around what I find to be most beautiful, and most interesting, and my hope is one day to reach an apotheosis of general goodness and the beautiful. I wouldn't call this weird as an ultimate desire...it is definitely more authentic to the human condition and I get the sense that it is closer to what I'm looking for. And if I have learned anything in the past few years, its that my entire being is looking for something, I'm just usually blinded to the right means of getting there. Unfortunately, often blinded to the ends as well. But that's a different topic.

The point is that I have to learn how to deal with beauty. I hate to say this, but beauty fails me. I wish it weren't the case.

Somewhere along the line I think I'm going to find Christ in such a legit way. Of course I see it now, but actually honestly living something you see...well...thats different. And maybe all of this fluctuation in lordships will render my finding absolute lordship in Christ so valuable I'll never leave.

I'd like to start thinking about what having Christ as Lord really means.

Hopefully this beauty thing will fail me as much as productivity did...and when Christ is King it will gently fall in a peaceful ordinance of a well-ordered soul.....

hmm. something to think about.

Dallas Willard

"The killing fields of Cambodia come from the philosophical discussions in Paris"

We should build structure from right thinking, and not let the structure obstruct the human need to be free and have peace.