Year of the Penguin

For if Christ be the rock where on the church is built, whereas he is a living stone, those that are laid and built on him must be lively stones also… they must be like unto Christ himself, partaking of his nature, quickened by his Spirit, so, as it were, to be bone of his bones, and flesh of his flesh… Nor can any be built on him but a living faith, effectual in universal obedience. These things the generality of men like not at all.

—John Owen The Person of Christ - God and Man

As long as we ourselves are trying to help shape someone else’s destiny, we are never quite free of the question whether what we’re doing it really for the other person’s benefit - at least in any matter of great importance. But when all the possibility of of cooperating in anything is suddenly cut off, then behind any anxiety about him there is the consciousness that his life has now been placed wholly in better and stronger hands. For you, and for us, the greatest task during the coming weeks, and perhaps months, may be to entrust each other to those hands… . I am to suppress all the questions that i may keep wanting to ask myself in this connection. Whatever weakness, miscalculations, and guilt there is in what precedes the facts, God is in the facts themselves. If we survive during these coming weeks or months, we shall be able to see quite clearly that all has turned out for the best. The idea that we could have avoided many of life’s difficulties if we had taken things more cautiously is to foolish to be entertained for a moment. As I look back on your past I am so convinced that what has happened hitherto has been right, that I feel what is happening now is right too. To renounce a full life and its real joys in order to avoid pain is neither Christian nor human.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Letters and Papers From Prison

Written to Renate and Eberhard Bethge on January 23rd, 1944. Eberhard had been drafted into the military and sent to Italy. He had married Renate early the year before, but the couple had spent little time together. She was nine months pregnant at the time. Eberhard would later be arrested for his part in the German resistance, and Bonhoeffer would be die in a concentration camp.