F.C. Shultz > Recent Status Updates

3rd or 4th time through. Foundational for me.

Family read aloud.

“Building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected.”

Oh, boy, I think I’m really going to enjoy this one. Here’s a quote from the preface.

“What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn’t elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever.”

This absolute gem of a line is from the second entry….really looking forward to this book.

“Faith is not a way to hold God close. Faith is trust that God will see me, hear me, know me, and come.”

This collection starts with a 462 line, 77 stanza beast of a poem full of gems. What a statement to kick it off.

“All worldly joys go less / To the one joy of doing kindnesses.”

“Perhaps we are the weak ones, and God comes to us inwardly only because we have failed to perceive him in the crying child, in the nail driven cleanly into the wood, in the ordinary dawn sun that merely to see clearly is sufficient prayer and praise.”

Somehow I haven’t tracked this on Goodreads? This is probably my 4th time through. I like to reread it before I start first-drafting a new book to try to harness some of Bradbury’s magic.

I mean, this might be one of my top ten favorite novels. Checks all the boxes for me. Really enjoying this reread.

It’s wild to get a glimpse at how many decades of research and study, how many millions of dollars of funding, and how many smart men and women from multiple disciples worked together to build the AI we know today….and now some guy can make anonymous cat videos on Facebook and get millions of views.

So far so fun, although the whole time I’m just imagining Doctor Strange and Bilbo Baggins running around London, which isn’t so bad I guess.

Burnt Norton, III

“Distracted from distraction by distraction.”

- life in 2024

“O my dear son, / there may be pain here, but there is no death.”

Canto XXVII

$0.99 Kindle Sale on my new book, Sparrow and The Stream, a fast-paced, heart-felt technothriller for fans of Blake Crouch, Hugh Howey, and the Fallout franchise. https://a.co/d/3emT1CY

Well, it’s only up from here.

“It is important for us to realize that when Jesus says, “It is accomplished,”he does not simply mean, ‘I have done all the things I wanted to do.’ He also means ‘I have allowed things to be done to me that needed to be done to me in order for me to fulfill my vocation.’” -Henri Nouwen, Day 33

“First, as the Greek Stoics affirmed, and as is evident throughout Christian spirituality, true friendship is only possible among people who are practicing virtue.”

Wish me luck…

“Becoming the beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about and doing from hour to hour.”

I’ve got too many books going, but am excited to start this. Had to get this quote down from the introduction:

“Rather than blame things for being obscure, we should blame ourselves for being biased and prisoners of self-induced repetitiveness.”