“Until conservatism can get a distance from the big-spending, privacy-busting, debt-ridden, crony-laden, fundamentalist, intolerant, incompetent and arrogant faux conservatism of the Bush-Cheney years, it will never regain a coherent message to actually govern this country again.” (>>)

Maybe that part of you dies. The part that was deeper than work and laundry and oil changes; the part that felt like there was something more, and that it was right there, just out of reach. Maybe it dies a little every time another soul subtly begs you to show it to them, and, fearing rejection, you suppress it. Tell a lie. Make small talk. Maybe it dies, or maybe it just lies dormant. Waiting for you to realize and loathe the shallow, malfunctioning person you’ve become; to miss it. And maybe then it comes back to you on a lonely, quiet night when you’ve finally stopped, or been forced to stop, for long enough to notice. And it gives you one last chance, and you can either give up everything and embrace it completely and start living for the first time, and finally reach that which you’ve been desperately pining for your entire life; or, again out of fear, you can quietly reject it one last time, even lying to yourself about the significance of what you’re doing, and pass a point where you can no longer go back, where the only path left is a meaningless, vacant existence spent in bars talking about nothing to people who’ve made the same decisions you have, or in cubicles doing empty work in order to pay for a lifestyle designed to distract you from what you’ve lost.

…

I don’t think my problem is that I don’t know what I want or how to get it. I don’t know what I want or how to get it, but that’s not my problem. There’s something stopping me before I even get that far. I think my problem is that I’m afraid of… I don’t even know. I’m afraid of trying; of moving; of asserting my desire for greatness. I want to hide. I want safety…

“…a lack of certainty is, in many cases, a needed and Biblical virtue and excessive certainty is often just another name for arrogance…” (>>)

“It’s ok, I can get another job…”
“What?”
“I can have another one tomorrow. It’s just a job…”
“Stop saying that! There’s no such thing as, ‘just a job.’ Anything that takes up your time takes up your life. What if you never do anything that you think is important?” (>>)

“… ‘conservative,’ inerrancy loving evangelicals who claim to be doing verse by verse exegesis are often just hanging their own thoughts and advice onto a shallow reading of the text.” (>>)