On waking up

After I graduated from college in December, I turned off my brain.  Reading did not appeal to me at all.  My job is a tremendous blessing, but it feels pretty mindless after awhile.  I have watched a lot of TV these past few months, barely filtering it, always choosing Hulu or Netflix over anything productive.  If it made me laugh, I watched it and I laughed.

The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God.  Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life, blindfold, as it were, with no sense of direction and understanding of what surrounds you.  This way you can waste your life, and lose your soul.

Dr. J.I. Packer
Knowing God

I feel that my mind has been reopened, my intellect stimulated, my soul suddenly made aware of its ravishing hunger for the knowledge of God.  It seems that I am finally exiting a season of recovery from undergraduate work, a season of complacency and dullness.  I want to learn again.  I want to grow. I don't want to become a ghost.

One can see them everywhere: women who are ghosts, young and old, who while living shrilly are still examples of voicelessness, of the divided soul, of longing gone wrong.

I can't say it with enough emphasis: you can't afford to be casual about any part of your life.  The misplacement of longing, the mistaking of the temporal for eternal will always turn you into a ghost.

Dr. Rosalie de Rosset
Unseduced and Unshaken: The Place of Dignity in a Young Woman's Choices

Do you have any insights on managing time well?