Rick Davis

“He studied Latin like the violin, because he liked it.”
― Robert Frost

“The expression 'to lose one's faith', as one might a purse or a ring of keys, has always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked so much.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it. That is why old-fashioned confessors are not far wrong in showing a certain amount of scepticism when dealing with 'intellectual crises', doubtless far more rare than people imagine. An educated man may come by degrees to tuck away his faith in some back corner of his brain, where he can find it again on reflection, by an effort of memory: yet even if he feels a tender regret for what no longer exists and might have been, the term 'faith' would nevertheless be inapplicable to such an abstraction, no more like real faith, to use a very well-worn simile, than the constellation of Cygne is like a swan.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“God doesn’t rescue perfect people. He wants people with problems. People with nothing to fix have nothing to say to God. Those who are poor in spirit, those who are in mourning, those who are meek—those are blessed (Matt. 5:3–5) because they can be filled, can be comforted, can be helped. He never said, “Blessed are those who have their act together.” If nothing is broken, nothing can be fixed. We are drawn to this gospel message because we have problems. And after joining a church, we spend our next forty years trying to hide our problems. Having no problems is a problem. The self-righteous attitude of thinking we have no problems is what birthed Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1940s. People found that in A.A. meetings they could still have struggles; they could still be needy. In fact, they had to confess their shortcomings at every meeting. The church today is making great strides in embracing this biblical attitude. The church should be a place where it’s safe to be unfinished, incomplete, and needy.”
― Henry Cloud, 12 "Christian" Beliefs That Can Drive You Crazy

“Son," his father said. "Run faithfully to the end, and like all good men, you will die of having lived.”
― N.D. Wilson, The Drowned Vault