“Chuck Norris does not sleep, he waits.”
There is a subtle message here: we should live our lives so that we can’t wait for the new day to get back to our calling.
Charles Johnson poses this scenario: Imagine a gun was held to my head and somebody was going to pull the trigger as soon as the last word of the last paragraph was finished. Now if I can write out of the sense that I’m going to die as soon as the work is done, then I will write with urgency, honesty, courage, and without flinching.
“If a work is written like that, then I want to read it,” Johnson says. “I’ll say, ‘This is serious. This person is not fooling around. …this work is the writer saying something, because he or she feels that if it isn’t said, it will never be said.’”
In Old Testament scripture Job was so convinced of the eternal realities and life in heaven that even after all his trials (losing his livestock, home, family and even his health) he said: “O that my words were written down! And that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last…in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:23-26).
Job’s proclamation is FAITH. This is living and writing with intensity. This is all real and all powerful.
In William Faulkner’s “Nobel Peace Prize for Literature Acceptance Speech” he challenges authors to write about “…love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Failing this one “…writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”
A writer must strive “…to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before… the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat” Faulkner says.
Bertrand Russell sought three passions to govern his life: “the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind”.
“I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy …because it relieves loneliness and… because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.”
Knowledge and love lead us upward, Russell contends, but pity brings us back to earth. The cries of pain from our fellow man make a mockery of what human life should be.
We can live our lives “in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social,” Russel says. To care for what is noble, what is beautiful and gentle “will cause hate and greed and envy to die because there is nothing to nourish them.”
God has given us natural gifts and talents. Through education and perseverance we can develop these gifts and accomplish many good things. Jesus nourishes the talents within us with even greater, spiritual gifts.
