Comments on: “Those people”

By: Michelle Arms

Michelle Arms — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:47:39 +0000

My comment was responding to the blog post, not your quote (a great one at that!) Ali :)

By: Alison Searle

Alison Searle — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:34:53 +0000

Simplicity and desire don’t need to be antithetical. I should add that the last post was a quote!

By: Steph Irons

Steph Irons — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:07:40 +0000

yeh i can do without stress and responsibility too, to a certain extent. a job doesnt have to be top-level to hold my interest. that being said, i strongly dislike most factory work.

By: Michelle Arms

Michelle Arms — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:07:01 +0000

I think I’m one of those people… in the words of Ella Fitzgerald: “give me the simple life” :)

By: Steph Irons

Steph Irons — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 20:35:22 +0000

good points luke. agreed. providing it really was a choice. and in many cases – it is.

By: Alison Searle

Alison Searle — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:43:02 +0000

As Jürgen Moltmann observes, Marx got it quite wrong
in his description of religious hope as an ‘opiate’: ‘Faith’, he writes, ‘wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those
who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled
present’. Thus Christian hope is a disposition through which the believer (and through transformed lives and renewed communities, the world) is, by the Spirit, drawn gradually towards and conformed to the pattern of that promised future of God which is hoped for. Faith’s present, that is to say, is shaped, orientated and energized by the ways in which, under the guidance of Word and spirit together, faith imaginatively apprehends and patterns this future promise, and seeks to live
already in the light of it.

By: Alison Searle

Alison Searle — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:21:24 +0000

Well, I agree with that! ;)

By: Luke Arms

Luke Arms — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:15:56 +0000

You’re right; those who are less ambitious/restless still strive, in some way, for something. What I was trying to rebut (feebly, I’m sure) was the notion that another person’s striving should look like the sort of striving I understand / respect before I’ll accept it as worthwhile. To onlookers, a person may appear uncreative or to completely lack initiative… that doesn’t make them less valuable or diminish the contributions they make in more subtle ways than their more visionary counterparts. Trying to extract initiative that meets my expectations from people who simply don’t have it? That seems foolish, and wrong.

By: Alison Searle

Alison Searle — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:04:03 +0000

Luke, I wonder if this post is creating a false antithesis between leader/follower, teacher/pupil, restless achiever/content producer/manual labourer? Some people are undoubtedly more ambitious, restless and committed to constant striving than others, but a degree of unsatisfied longing/desire is an element of the all complicit in the state of fallen humanity prior to the eschaton, isn’t it?