Searching For a Balance

October 5, 2022

Leadership Notes

This week, I thought I'd share some things I've read over the past few months. These are entirely other people's thoughts, not my own. Make of them what you will!

The first is excerpted from an article by one of my favorite writers/essayists, Walter Kirn. Back in July, he wrote on "The Holy Anarchy of Fun":

Fun - when your rulers would rather you not have it, and when the agents

of social programming insist on stirring nonstop apprehension over the

current crisis and the next one, the better to keep you submissive and in

suspense - is elementally subversive. Fun is ideologically neutral, advancing

and empowering no cause. Fun is self-serving and without ambition. It

wishes only to be. It produces nothing for the collective and may represent

a withdrawal from the collective, temporarily at least. Your fun belongs to

you alone…

We live in a rule-bound era of high vigilance. It’s a time of emergency

measures and vast decrees, of curbs on expression, behavior, and even

movement. They are portrayed as serving the common good and some

people obey them in this spirit, others so they can be seen obeying them.

Fun, with its little anarchies, is suspect. It’s regarded as selfish, wasteful,

perhaps unsanitary. To some degree, it always has been this way here, at

least since the frowning pilgrims came ashore. “Puritanism: The haunting

fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” wrote the cigar-sucking

cynic HL Mencken. How else to explain the mentality of leaders who

thought to combat a respiratory virus by dumping tons of sand from front-

end loaders into a seaside California skate park?

Kirn goes on, and it's a fun read.

Never to be confused for a writer of humor, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed:

"I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They

struggle with the evil inside a human being {inside every human being}. It

is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to

constrict it within each person."

Me, I'm just searching for that balance between unbridled joy and abject despondency over my sin.

Finally, this from Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

We are living in an age when people even justify the fact that they never

attend a place of worship at all on the grounds that "God is love." They

justify immorality in the same way, "God is love." They do not worship God

at all, they worship an image they erected.

And now, your Moment of Spurgeon:

"Do not grieve your neighbors by your meddlesomeness. We have

all enough to do at home, and it is prudent to keep out of all

disputes which do not belong to us."

With Much Love and Affection,

Richard