Quotable

Arthur Ashe’s moving memoir ‘Days of Grace’ ends with a heartfelt letter to his (then) six year old daughter Camera in which he unpacks all the things he suspects his illness will deny him the opportunity of telling her in future. Covering a range of categories from the importance of family, racial discrimination, loss, marriage, money and even faith, it reads like a distillation of many years of living and learning. The section where he talks about faith and religion reads like a primer for a balanced, liberal, yet essentially Judeo-Christian worldview. Excerpts below: ...

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems.. …so said Salman Rushdie. The corollary is that memory is deceptive, and nostalgia can skew our recollection of things so much that it becomes an alternate reality far removed from the cold, hard facts as they occurred. Sometimes clarity hits you suddenly like a blow to the solar plexus, at other times the bleeding obvious slowly becomes apparent. All told, some day a bloke has to decide – what’s important, what’s not, and what to leave to fight another day….

Breaking up has its perks - especially when there was the small matter of a six hour difference and 3,000 plus miles. On the plus side, the need to remember birthdays (I sucked majorly at this, which probably added to my being kicked to the kerb), answer phone calls at odd hours of the day and be a pillar of strength to someone finally vanishes, and one is free to pursue other interests. On the flip side, the months of getting to know someone from the ground up are then tossed away, as though all meaning were trivial. Only after a while does the real cost register - long periods that were once filled with sharing the minutiae of life are suddenly filled with solitude; solitude which has the potential to bend one’s mind and numb it into a stupor. ...

A few weeks ago, ‘Jane Doe’ prompted some deep thinking by Single Nigerian, leading him to ponder if trying now and then was enough when others had sacrificed things (even their lives) to ‘get the word to the common man.’ I was listening to an old message by Al Mohler - Being Men and Raising Men [ mp3] - whilst walking to work today, and a section [begins at 51;11] struck me as being a very apt answer to that question. ...

If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large. William Wilberforce (Abolusionist & Member of Parliament)

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. Jim Elliot (Missionary to Ecuador and Martyr)

The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night. For all the ill that Satan can do, when God describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is a piece of land, a yoke of oxen, and a wife ...