Sublime

“My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water . . .” First, God has been removed from the center. I did not choose when to be born, where to be born, who my family would be, what my race would be—and the list could go on and on. All the evidence points to one conclusion: I am not the author.

Beneath all of this, Weil says, is a loss of any sense of God.

The same principle is conveyed in the second saying. If you are willing to lose your life for his sake—if you are willing to set aside personal safety, comfort, and satisfaction in order to obey and follow Jesus—then in the end you will find yourself. You will discover who you really are in Christ and finally come to be at peace. If instead you try

We see the void and it terrifies us; it looks to us like utter negation. So we try to set up something in life that affirms our existence. Against death, which we see as the ultimate failure, we offer up success. Against death, which we see as the ultimate emptiness, we offer up the acquisition of objects. Against death, which we see as the end of

The Greek philosophers and especially the Stoics had tried “valiantly to relieve us of the fears linked to death, but at the cost of obliterating our individual identity.”82 But Christianity offered something radically more satisfying. Ferry says that what human beings want “above all is to be reunited with our loved ones, and, if possible, with