And the king said to her, “What is it, Queen Esther? What is your request? It shall be given you, even to the half of my kingdom.” And Esther said, “If it please the king, let the king and Haman come today to a feast that I have prepared for the king.”
Esther 5:3–4
There are some days that I just sit with a passage and get nowhere. But remember, this is a relationship, and “relational time is wildly inefficient.” If you’ve had young kids, you know what I’m talking about. About 80 percent of the conversations I have with my four-year-old are total nonsense, but I put in the effort to get to the 20 percent that are pure gold. Regardless of the proportions, all relational time—including our time with the Lord—can feel inefficient at certain moments.
Jordan Raynor, Redeeming Your Time, loc. 717.
The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.
If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal.
C.S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time”, from The Weight of Glory, p. 49
