day no. 17,403: shadow lands

"The critics cannot bring themselves to believe that a man will ever again have a taste for going back to the originals, as more interesting then the copies. For all the apparent materialism and mass mechanism of our present culture, we, far more than any of our fathers, live in a world of shadows." — G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (1933)

We prefer shadows to substance. Instead of going back to the well of life, we mass produces stickers of wells and slap them on everything. Rather than rely on the originals from where the copies got their inspiration, we make copies of the copies and enjoy ever decreasing returns on our investments. As a result, we are continually taking additional steps away from the means. We are wringing out whatever we can from a towel that hasn't been near any water for decades. The shadow lands point back to the substance. The shadow of the cross is meant to turn your eyes to the cross itself and the light behind it. The shadow of a glass of water cannot quench your thirst, but the water in the glass actually could.

Isaiah 45:22

Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.

day no. 17,402: the beginning and the end of all days

"The best way to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas." — G. K. Chesterton

Christmas will someday conquer the world. Christendom will do for June what it has already done for December, which is to say, deliver it from darkness.

The summer months flooded with sun will someday be eclipsed by the Son.

The postmillennial leaven spreads through the lump of January. Twelfth night is punctuated by Epiphany.

The calendar belongs to Christ. 

Every day is the day of the Lord. We set aside some days for special purposes, like one in seven being recognized as the Lord's Day, but we do so as part of seeing all days bow their knees to their Lord and King.

day no. 17,401: to compromise is to concede

“Every ‘Allahu Akbar’ reminds people that we're in a very serious struggle with a very depraved religion.” — Christopher Hitchens on Islam

Islam is not a respectable monotheistic religion, it is a detestable abomination. It is a Christian heresy inaugurated by conversation with a sand demon. It advances on the grounds of might makes right which is wrongheadedness incarnate. 

“There will never be peace on this earth so long as we have this book [the Quran]...it's a violent and cursed book.” — Sir William Gladstone

When the world is entirely under the footstool of Christ, weapons will be hammered down into farm implements, but not before then. The reign of Christ will be peace. If Islam were to envelop the world, wars would not end. Islam is a religion of warfare. The God of creation inserted enmity into the story in the Garden of Eden when He initiated the holy war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. The goal of that war, however, is peace. God wages peace. He puts down wickedness with peace in mind. The wars will end when wickedness is ended. Peace is at war with warfare and when it wins, warfare will be destroyed. But until then, we fight the good fight of waging peace. Islam is one of those things we must fight. You cannot partner with mayhem without reaping more mayhem.

"A civilization is not destroyed by wicked men; it is destroyed by weak men who cannot defend what is good.” — G. K. Chesterton

We do not need more coexist cult apologists advocating for harmony and respect among entities that despise each other. The flesh is at war with the Spirit and the Spirit returns the favor. They are in each other's way. They want different things and go about achieving their ends in different ways. They cannot coexist. They refuse to place nice, but only one of the two is willing to admit that out loud. Wickedness often postulates a cease fire in order to advance its cause. Peace never relents. It would never suggest such a compromise. It would never allow the holy to be a little bit corrupted for the sake of preserving holiness. To compromise is to concede. To flounder is to forfeit.

“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.” — Thomas Sowell

And so, we must fight the good fight as the good Lord has commanded us. We cannot except peace to materialize out of thin air and even less than can we expect it to be produced by capitulating to the cares and concerns of the corrupt.

day no. 17,400: falling like lightning

"Our streets are in a permanent dazzle, and our mind are a permanent darkness" — G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (1927)

While we have figured out how to keep our street light engaged 24 hrs a day we have forgotten how to keep our minds engaged for a single minute. We may have artificial lights on all the time in our cities and never have a single light bulb go off in our mind. We have learned how to keep the night from becoming dark, but we have forgotten how to brighten our mood. We light the night on fire with electricity and we benight our brains in the maw of modernity. We have brought the stars down to our streets and fixed them intermittently along our paths to guide our ways. We have harnessed the lights and lost hold of the reins of our sanity. The light bulb did not darken our souls per se, but our dependence on it and our abandonment of the other has. In imagining ourselves masters of the universe, we have made ourselves slaves to our sinful natures; and just like Satan, we fall like lightning, which is a very bright and yet very dark ordeal.

day no. 17,399: the day everything became something

"God is not bound down and limited by being merely everything. He is also at liberty to be something." — G.K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity (1920)

Christmas is the celebration of everything becoming something. In the beginning, God made everything from nothing. Everything, that is, except for Himself. He was not made. He is the Maker. He is the everything who made something, all things that have been made as it turns out. So, there existed a distinction. The Creator and His creation. The one thing that He was not was a created thing. But even that did not prove too difficult an obstacle for Him to overcome.

John 1:1-3

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

The Word that was God became like the words He spoke. He became like a created thing in order to dwell among His creation. All things were created by Him in the beginning and in the incarnation He made Himself a created thing.

John 1:14

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

The incarnation is the miracle of the One who made everything from nothing becoming something in particular. The incarnation does not destroy the distinction between Creator and creation, but it does bridge the distinction. Jesus is Jacob's ladder. He is the mediator between heaven and earth and there is no other safe way to approach the Father but through Him.

day no. 17,398: forgeries confirm the official

"All forgeries draw their significance from a signature." — G.K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity (1920)

Without the authentic, the fraudulent ceases. Forgeries presuppose an original and counterfeit preys upon the codified. 

You can have goodness without sin, God for example, but you cannot have sin without goodness. Sin is derivative. Holiness is substantive. Sin is contingent on good. Without a standard of goodness, there is no such thing as evil. Without purity there is no such thing as perversion. Without beauty there is no such thing as ugly. Without truth there is no such thing as lies. But because there is one, true, pure, holy, good and beautiful God, there is a way to differentiate, with confidence, what is good, true, and beautiful, and more to my point here, what is not.

day no. 17,397: a wilde idea

"But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde." — G.K. Chesterton

You cannot put a price on a sunset per se, but you can pay for them. One party says that things without price tags are not worth saving up for while another saves itself for the things without price tags. The truth is priceless and so unfaithful men don't attempt to pay for it. Beauty is invaluable and so godless men do not value it. Goodness is inestimable and so wicked men do not esteem it. But you can live up to a sunset. It cannot be purchased in the way the world looks to purchase things, however. It is not so cheap as to be bought that way. It can only be bought by sacrifice. It can only be obtained by letting go. The meek shall inherit the earth by receiving it in meekness not in grabbing it from God is greediness.