Who's this little rascal?!?

An Amusing Portrait of the Romantic Mind

Mr Darcy, "Pride & Prejudice":
A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from
admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment!

Thought I'd lighten the mood after all my talk of death and despair. Consider the following question:

How often do we examine our daydreams? Do they perhaps resemble something like...

Sonnet #15
O when she comes along, the perfect girl,
And the glories of bachelorhood ends,
I will surely away, my sails unfurl,
Carried on by the winds of love she sends.
But what foolishness to spend all one's time
In the fruitless pursuit of daydreams;
Some even fancy hearing the bells chime,
Perhaps a carriage or punting down streams.
I see around me many at this game,
And chuckle at seeing them all aglow;
But truly we are all one and the same,
And wish'd romance wouldn't tarry so.
Remember, while imagining the "I do",
That you don't find love, rather it finds you.





While we may give a wry, ironic smile at this little picture, I hope that it also serves to alert us to the waywardness of our own thoughts. The reprimand at the end is not just aimed at our 'romantic' inner digressions but generally at the way our thoughts can stray and become unhelpful. Also, a disproportionate amount of thought on a certain subject can serve as a warning sign.

What do I daydream most about? If the answer to this is something that is unhelpful or unfruitful, as in the above example, or sinful, then we really need to rally our thoughts and submit them to God to (re)mould them himself. Remember the dreams of a young man can easily become the bitterness of a young man if these dreams are not rooted in God's will for him. Dreams are good, but we must dream of the things of above - this is what motivated Abraham, as we are told in Hebrews, and it must be what motivates us. We must pursue a vision of a heavenly kingdom, which has come to us (when Jesus came) and which we belong to (as a result of our faith in his death and resurrection to redeem us and restore our relationship with God, the Father) but which we cannot yet see. We eagerly wait for this kingdom in the return of our Lord Jesus Christ in glory. He came as a suffering servant and he will return as King and Judge.

Our daydreams must stem from the our relationship with God through Jesus Christ, grounded in His Word, and from a zeal for the verbal proclamation of his gospel until he returns!

(Here are some guys who are doing it!)

...existentialist angst: a footnote

Something else to cheer your day up...

Sonnet #24

They say ignorance is bliss, so they say,
They for whom issues of life feature not.
But what dread reality on that Day
Will face them: condemned forever to rot.
Do you not see it already at work;
This decay that is human existence?
Wake up! See the rest of forever lurks;
Failing to flee from death just makes no sense.
Oh, that you would soon from your stupor wake,
As rats on a doomed ship, run for safety
To Him who to a safe haven can take
All who trust and follow Christ Almighty.
        Only on this side of eternity
        Is life sweet under the death penalty.