Personal Thoughts

The devil enshrouds in diffuse shadows
The Lord illuminates in lucid brilliance

mjg/23

Jesus didn’t precisely claim to be God because He’s not precisely God, He’s the Son.

mjg/23

Everybody needs a win. Everybody needs a recent win. Everybody needs a chance at another win.

mjg/23

Knowledge goes before wisdom because knowledge grows faster than its understanding.

mjg/23

The only rational play is the irrational play.

mjg/23

A watched pot never boils. A forgotten store is always full.

mjg/23

There are no dangerous questions if you’re looking for true answers.

mjg/23

All achievement is a lottery of time, place, and means. So, congratulations on your high position in your preferred area of interest granted you by whim and fortune. Silence your inner worship and humble yourself. Praise, instead, the only truly praiseworthy: He Who holds Whim and Fortune in His Hand — God, Almighty.

mjg/23

unknowable alphas unrooted by unmoored zoomers unschooled by unstable wyres unraised by unattached slackers uninvolved by unyielding boomers unfettered by unassuming silenters unbound by unapproachable greaters unrestrained by unconquerable lost

mjg/23

The way back from postmodernism is to realize we can trace back the deconstruction to the construction as we can trace back prism light from dissociation to association.

mjg/22

If we won’t save souls we won’t save anything.

mjg/22

The thing that scares most off the hero’s journey is that it has a long stretch that looks like the zero’s journey.

mjg/22

Any invocation of the infinite is an invocation of God. Science, take note.

mjg/22

Principles keep you straight. Pragmatics take you wherever the wind is blowing.

mjg/22

Art is the creation of an author, working in a medium, communicating a message.

mjg/22

Intuition is your subconscious acting rationally when your conscious is not. The degree to which you learn in your conscious is the degree to which your subconscious will reveal its rationality through intuition and the more input it has the better its estimated guesses will be. Stay hungry, keep learning.

mjg/22

Redefining “Sin Boldly”: The Christian gift to fall on God’s Mercy and Grace when his conscience implores a choice be made in which it may be certain some evil will result but the choice is made nonetheless for the good it promises. Eg. Elections, Civil Disobedience

mjg/21

Creationism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

mjg/21

It is very possible to misuse the fruits of your blessings.

mjg/21 (Thoughts while listening to Tom Holland’s Dominion)

The problem with time travel is the same problem as with the multiverse – that of infinite regress: What can happen has already happened, including universal annihilation. Nothing should be – at all. Infinity is a harsh mistress.

mjg/21

What doesn’t kill you doesn’t kill you.

mjg/20

Consider the life of a great individual while they are still with you. Remember them more when they pass. Their lives, stretched beginning to end, like the curve of a lens, should serve to bring into focus our own life that we might live more truly alive.

mjg/18

Stop asking “What would Jesus do?” and start asking “What did Jesus do?”

mjg/16

If nothing stopped you, you’d stop at nothing.

mjg/16

glib,  “God Left In Box”; adj. fluent and voluble but insincere and shallow

mjg/16 (see also)

Love wins. No, God wins. But God is love? True, but Love is not god.

mjg/16

Design top-down, build bottom-up. Investigate problems top-down, solve problems bottom-up.

mjg/16

You can’t critically engage somebody, informally, before you’ve engaged them in a personal way. They will recoil at the critique. You can only engage formally and let it be.

mjg/16

Every man and woman has a deep rooted need for love at the familial, the intimate, and the spiritual levels.

mjg/16

God is the original poet and His verse is writ deep in history.

mjg/15

Never sacrifice people for things.

mjg/15

“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.” (Tao Te Ching) But this is illogical: The one saying this speaks – and so does not know. The reality is this: Those who know often struggle to speak. Those who speak often struggle to know.

mjg/15

The gap between the North American Christian conservative right and the Christian liberal left is love on the right and truth on the left. The bridge between them is the truth-in-love.

mjg/15

I’ll see it when I believe it.

mjg/14 (Matt-isms)

Today is what we made of yesterday. Tomorrow will be what we made of today. Make, then, of your todays what you want of your tomorrows.

mjg/14

The problem is not that we’re all not doing enough, it’s that many are not doing anything at all. You can’t give more than 100% but many people giving even 10% can accomplish much, more more.

mjg/14

One of the greatest signs God gave man was that of the interlocked lovers’ hands. The fingers of your hand represent strengths and the gap between them weaknesses.  Couples are not well suited because they are the same. The opposite is true. They are well suited for each other because their strengths and weaknesses cleave together, being uplifted themselves with new strengths and uplifting the other with their own strengths.

mjg/14

There are deep, yet simple, root causes at play here. Teach a man or woman they are an animal and they will act as such. Superficial change won’t lead to actual change which ultimately exists in the realm of the convicted heart.

mjg/14 (Facebook post on a #YesAllWomen article)

Purpose is found in challenges that help others, not in those that help yourself.

mjg/14

Buy what you know you need, not what you think you might need.

mjg/13

You hold your word in your hands. Should you ever break your word, it shall fall and break into pieces, and you will never wholly put yourself back together again.

mjg/13 (paraphrased Ravi Zacharias anecdote)

“Um…” can no longer be construed to imply the speaker has no more planned thought to speak. Intriguingly, it is now actually used to fend off interruptions while the speaker formulates further speech.

mjg/13

Signal your intention not your action.

mjg/13

There are no what ifs, only what is – the possibilities are endless.

mjg/13

Intellect scales, effort doesn’t.
Work smarter, not harder.

mjg/13

The strum of a guitar against the chest is, I suppose, next in heavenliness to the beating of her heart held close.

mjg/13

There is nothing in you. But there is everything in God. And He can make something from nothing.

mjg/13

You will have achieved inner enlightenment when you finally come to understand the true purpose of those clearly inedible slices on the end of a loaf of bread.

mjg/13

Keep doing what you’re doing.
Don’t walk away.
Don’t give up.

mjg/13

It is pride and foolishness to think ‘you’ can change the world. But it is neither of these things to think that ‘we’ can change the world. One, by one, by one.

mjg/13

If you’re unable to find joy in your life right now, you’re mistaken if you believe you’ll find it when you’ve ‘finally made it’. Discover contentment wherever you find yourself, and joy will arrive a step behind.

mjg/13

The important thing to remember about doom’s day predictions is not that it’s supposed to happen on a given day, but that it’s going to happen any day, at any moment. Live then as if you were out of time and up for account, so that in any day, in any moment, you have encouraged yourself to “produce fruit in keeping with repentance.”

mjg/12

You can’t. But God can.

mjg/12

The mark of a good tv show is the lack of a need to resolve plot lines within each time slot.

mjg/12

He will never love her truly unless he first knows the love of God. For in knowing God he comes to understand his own nature, his relationship with God, and his relationship with her. If he loves her truly, as the soul she really is, God’s own daughter, then he will love her like no other because he will love her in spirit and in truth.

mjg/12

When you preach the world, you pacify everyone. When you preach the Word, you ignite a spark which burns some and lights up others. Don’t preach your vain words to the mere ear, but instead let the Holy Spirit preach the Word straight to the heart.

mjg/12

Among the many things which may be praised in any grand cultural accomplishment is, least of all, the attainment of the thing itself. Rather, it may be rightly understood, that it is in the plodding process of painstakingly winning each heart and mind who, when won to the cause, join in unison and lift a chorused voice that may now be heard with convincing clarity. For without the conviction which wins hearts, we are doomed to spend our days drifting from one vogue notion to the next, and thereby despair in our search for that gravity, that gravity which holds us to our place but also sets us aright.

mjg/12

No man deserves to die at the hands of another man. Many men deserve death, and worse, but to be slain by a mere man is beneath his position – in his heart he knows only God, Himself, as Judge, Jury, and Executioner.

mjg/12

There are agonizing periods in a man’s life when he feels he is walking himself up to a wall, literally dragging his own legs around, and painfully directing his own eyes to stare down the rifle barrels of a firing squad, face to face with the man behind each gun, himself. Such is the power of that most deliriously desirous of prey. Such is the beautifully disastrous allure of she with whom, in love, he has fallen. Such is the curious tomfoolery of the Creator who forged this love that defies all sense, and defies all odds.

mjg/12

The bible doesn’t teach give money, get more money. It’s better than that. The bible teaches be a blessing, get WAY more blessed!

mjg/11

God created you with body, mind, and soul, that you would be equipped to reflect glory on the Creator when you, His Created, overcome mighty challenges by the very gifts that He granted. So, then, when the mountains stand against you, do all that you can do, and pray to God and trust He will do what only He can do, and your mountains shall be moved and your path will be made straight.

mjg/11

Simplify. Or it’s going to get complicated.

mjg/11

Don’t hope. Trust. In so far as our hope is only an all-suffusing, indefinite expectation of future good, we are lost. In so far as all creation groans in futility until the day all things are made new, and we hope in abstract, we gain only vanity. If, however, you trust, then you trust in someone or something with specific expectations for your future hopes, by definition. It is trust in One who has promised plans for you, Who can and will deliver good and plenty, that grants to hope life and being, form and shape. Where there is trust, there also is the silent confidence which hope alone can never satisfy. We must, then, not hope to desperation, but instead break open the fountain of eternal hope which is trust.

mjg/11

The passing of a prominent public figure may carry widely variant degrees of personal experience. Some may realize a strong, empathetic emotion even though they never knew the person. Still others may have an antithetical experience, unable to see the gravity of the situation as their peers’ see it. In the end, however, it behooves us all, when death occurs, that we reconsider again our own mortality in order that we might gain a clearer perspective of our own lives, and thereby more truly live.

mjg/11

If, when you rest weary eyes and bow a tired head, your mind involuntarily glimpses words, phrases and moments of past prayer, then you’re on a good path, walk in it.

mjg/11

A hard mind and hard heart tends to unrelenting ruthlessness, yet a soft mind and soft heart tends to wayward wandering. A soft mind and hard heart tends to flappable foolishness, but a hard mind and soft heart is the chosen clay of which the crafter says, “Of this refuse will I make something beautiful and of this frailty will I make a strong vessel.”

mjg/11

Be wary offering your admiration to those who achieve worldly success, by worldly means, from worldly views. As He said, “they have received their reward,” and, again, “your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

mjg/11

Wisdom can be gotten
but understanding has no price.

mjg/11

Think of time as a sequence of individual moments, one moment leading another, each a three-dimensional cube. You, and friends, family and acquaintances, in each moment, as subject. You hover over your life-line. You can look down from above and see the entirety of your moment-picture life. From this vantage point, you grasp ownership of the choices, made in the now, that affect subsequent moments and people in time not yet present. This is God’s view: Your entire life laid out before Him, outside of time, readily accessible, and infinitely searchable. The one who grasps this view of his own life, he it is who increases wisdom, and he it is who approaches understanding.

mjg/11

Et tu, Matthew?

mjg/11

Francis Bacon once said hope was a good breakfast but a bad supper. I, for one, am glad that I should still be eating.

mjg/11

People change. People change again. And He who made them at the beginning, who made them male and female, He is mighty to save.

mjg/11

Lord, please make me humble before I need to be humbled.

mjg/11

1 Corinthians 1:25, “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” Your role, Christian, is to live in God’s foolishness, appearing the fool to all. In doing this, you take on the weakness of God, allowing the foolishness of God to overturn the wisdom of men, that the world turned up-side down may see its reflection not merely mirrored but turned right-side up.

mjg/11

The world asks for a revolution but a revolution is simply the process of going in circles. What they really need is to identify the wrong way, turn about, and then head in the right way. What the world needs now is not revolution but redemption.

mjg/11

Luck is that remaining portion of effort, that divide between action and completion, which the universe dutifully throws a coin against. Those deemed luckier than others are, on the whole, simply those who endeavoured to narrow the divide in relation to their peers, be it by ever so slight a degree.

mjg/11

Christus Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank, in Him, Jesus Christ
For my redeemed and purchased soul.

In the fell-hard clutch of circumstance
I have sore-winced and cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of flagrance
My head is bloody and low-bowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the Shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
He is the captain of my soul.

Co-opted Invictus, mjg/10

Innocence is a gift despised by young and old. The young despise it to to hide the fact they do not yet see what others see. The old despise it to hide the fact they do see, all too clearly, what others see. Blessed is he who sees this bitterness, who goes and sows innocence to himself.

mjg/10

The mere knowledge of wisdom is insufficient to act upon it. A man will exhaust all folly, even to death and in the freedom of his wisdom, before he understands the heavy weights wisdom has placed upon his conscience, that he may finally know how to act wisely.

mjg/10

A man may have many passions, and, of these, many may bring him to sorrow. No man can be represented by a single dimension. He is complex. He is made in the image of God.

mjg/10

Swift as the arrow, piercing as the point is the thought before its sublime. Gone like the gazel, fleeting like the fox is the thought after its time.

mjg/10

There is only so much of others’ happiness one man can take.

mjg/10

I am become all that I have ever judged.

mjg/09

The man who can not afford time is already in debt.

mjg/09

To truly cultivate and understand those things you hold dear, you must appreciate that those things which you now hold absolute and sacred will be refitted or discarded, or rediscovered and reunderstood, by your very own children. Therefore, study again your most closely held beliefs in the light of an eternity of innumerable restudyings.

mjg/09

Try as you may to capture it, contentment will far outstrip you.

mjg/08

A man’s stature may be measured by the degree to which he allows himself to be fairly and openly challenged.

mjg/08

All existence is but opposing forces. The miracle of it all is the willed defiance of the natural order.

mjg/08

There is nothing worth having that is also not worth fighting for.

mjg/08

The only problem with democracy is apathy.

mjg/07

These thoughts are brilliance penned.

mjg/06

Money buys distractions.

mjg/05

2,142 reasons and an infinite number of monkies at an infinite number of typewriters writing an infinite number of reasons why the business rat race sucks.

mjg/03

The “doodle” is, quite possibly, the world’s most staunch and constant ally in times of need. That is, as it relates to cranium-based electron firing and grey matter stimulation.

mjg/03

The Kuro5hin Effect: Encouraging Arrogant, Self-Righteous, Pseudo-Intellectual ranting and raving since 1999!

mjg/02

While low ‘er the ground the glooms reside, far above and cloud-atop, rays of sun frolic and ride.

mjg/02

Religion is no longer the opiate of the masses. It has been clearly subjugated by the work day.

mjg/02

Better is physical pain than mental anguish.

mjg/02

It is a wise man who admits he knows little. It is, also, a foolish man who admits as much, yet does little to remedy it.

mjg/02

All learning is memory work until what is learned becomes what is experienced.

mjg/02

The price of freedom we bear in our mind,
the price of feardom we bear in our heart.
Where reason and rage do not intersect,
this is where we shall be blown apart.

mjg/02

The educational system no longer portrays the desire to increase knowledge, intelligence and understanding. Rather, the system languishes in the filthy gutter of its own greed, lulled into the belief that its mandate is to populate the capitalist market with droid employees, seeking no more than they can grasp, for their vision has been plucked from them since birth.

mjg/01

When in the night,
we see you all bright;
Come forth hereafter, song and laughter,
for ne’er are we so close to the light.

mjg/01

Any sufficiently large gathering of males tends discussion towards the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as it relates to locker room fare.

mjg/01

Blinding light from one direction should serve only to illuminate others.

mjg/01

The censorship and restrictions on the free flow of information, across the very institutions which must necessarily implant the fundamental concepts of the liberty which our forefathers fought to bring us, is hypocritical in the highest degree. To actively assert to our youth and leaders of our mutual future, through the devices and prime concepts of their upbringing, that information is corrupt lest it be presented in a fashion becoming of the engine of our secular success, is to breach the utter trust and belief in honesty and good faith upon which our nations were founded; and certainly must reside if our fingertips are ever to gain handhold beyond mediocrity.

mjg/01

In a land without escape,
in a land without thoughtful remuneration,
in a land without mental deviation,
nor acceptance of the same,
herein lies a vile creature
loosed by inaction and lack of vigilance:
Deadly in its ferocity, unavoidable in its timeliness.
Here lies the dearth of a rage long forgotten.

mjg/01

Where have you gone, oh joy of mine eyes?
Where have you flown to, my dove of morning?
You have departed from me.
As a soul leaves its shell,
you have ripped yourself from my mind.
Why have you forsaken me so, my sister?
Have I forsaken you?

mjg/01

Whither dost thou heart sailing go,
when the snow, its life source failing slow,
shall ride upon a clear night’s dreary,
soft, sunken, unseen clearly.

mjg/01

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things afflict them, and I am at their mercy, for the mirror does not lie.

mjg/01 (original)

The Slashdot Effect: Breeding Ignorant, Arrogant, Pompous Attitudes Since 1997!

mjg/01

With the invention of the mass media, it was made possible for the minor media to instantly become en masse players in a field, and in a philosophy, they have no authority or comprehension to be in.

mjg/01

The future is what we make of the present.

mjg/00

If I have seen further, it is by the tearing down of giants, that I may stand on their shoulders.

mjg/00

A wall, given legs, will still be wall. An obstacle to be climbed, crashed down, went around and dug under. But it is still a wall. And if a wall is to be overcome, it must necessarily retain the properties that make it a wall. For anything less would be a reproach on mankind’s self-respect.

mjg/00

It is surely a dire time when man’s sight becomes blurred, and the way free is lost in dividends of moral deception.

mjg/00

I succeed not because I fail not.

mjg/00

Woman is no longer a prize to be won. She is a prize to be won over.

mjg/00

What man amongst us holds the wisdom to find his way, when there is no light to guide him?

mjg/00

There is no true honour in having an enemy.

mjg/00

More things have occurred this day, than in all history combined.

mjg/00

If not time for mental excitation, whither dial doth err?

mjg/00

Given freedom from these bounds of institutional bettering, who would yet be a fool and swim back to dry, unmoving shores?

mjg/00

Blemished by pen, I dare death to speak it.
Yet glory beyond me presume false attire.
Wipe me clean lest I be destroyed,
make me sacrosanct that I may not be coyed.

mjg/99

Why these thoughts unbidden
although sweet hidden
contain the parts of
Heaven and Hell
my spirit wonders well
in times such as this
good outweighs evil
and envelopes me in
memories of nostalgic bliss.

mjg/99

I suppose the intellectually stimulating activity of “quote making” is a worthy activity in the face of stark and desolate periods of cranial ease.

mjg/99

A fleeting moment doth but pass
as an eternity for those with eyes of glass.

mjg/99

Such adulthood tires grey, when childness is put away.

mjg/99

I say, we do seem to have an irregular amount of non-cranially-participating-particles today, don’t we?

mjg/99

More than all things, this stands above, and below, all others: that a man be of such coarse nature, even the beasts in the field pay homage to him.

mjg/99

If the subject matter is simply a recurrence of a familiar vein, than one can clearly begin to see a revival of things left unsaid, and unthought, which are surpassingly beautiful to the subconscious mind.

mjg/99

The soul is the heart of the matter as the heart is the matter of the soul.

mjg/99

’tis ne’er a good thing to love afar, when one can love up close with arms ajar

mjg/99

Of such extravagance, I am not entirely faithful in the aspects of science and it’s children. However, I do respect those of that community and their endeavours for human kind.

mjg/99

I gain my stellar intellectual capacities from simply mind-numbing t.v..

mjg/99

Credit: Featured Image