more bunyan

I am telling you guys, this book is just truly a good book and a hard book all at the same time.  It challenges my sleeping brain to wake up and it challenges my soul to desire to please God so much more than I do on a daily basis.  Really, in many ways what I always feared has sort of come true.  I used to sit in the circles of higher education and stretch my mind with reading.  I used to get excited sitting in class thinking "what will I learn today?"

Now, I stay home.  My daily challenge is teaching my children their lessons.  Teaching my children what is acceptable with social interaction, behavior within a family unit, and hopefully teach them how to love God with their whole hearts.  But I find that my mind has (as I feared it might) sunk into numb slumber.  Bunyan is jolting me awake with Acceptable Sacrifice!  Life is painful,. relationships are painful, bodies become painful... who doesn't want to be healed and lifted up??

The brokenhearted man is a fainting man; he has his qualms, his sinking fits; he ofttimes dies away with pain and fear; he must be stayed with flagons, and comforted with apples, or else he cannot tell what to do; he pines, he pines away in his iniquity; nor can anything keep him alive and make him well but the comforts and cordials of Almighty God (Ex 33:12-11).  Wherefore with such an one God will dwell, to revive the heart, to revive the spirit.  'To revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.'