[...] Jesus has set before us two paths to travel through life, and we must choose one. He offers us a narrow path, which, although it is “contracted by pressure,” leads to life. He also offers us a broad path that is easier to travel but leads to destruction. Our temptation is to take the easy way, but it is not the best way. This could be a place where many people would use the excuse “It is just too hard.”
It is interesting that the narrow path, the one that leads to life, includes pressure. This is because the devil will do anything he can do to prevent us from taking the path that leads to a life we can enjoy. Notice that there are few who take the narrow path, but many take the broad path, not realizing, I’m sure, that it will lead to destruction, even though they have been warned.
If we choose to do the hard thing now, we will reap an abundant harvest (the fruit or results of our choices) in eternity. But if we take the easy path now, we will experience destruction and misery in eternity. We should begin now to live for eternity. We should not simply live for the moment, because it passes in the blink of an eye, and we are left with the consequences and results of the choices we made in it.
funny how similar this is to the way i've been thinking recently (secular)
I pray that you will be a person through whom God can work in the days in which we live. Ask yourself if you are more concerned with God’s will than with your own will. Does your heart break with what breaks God’s heart? Are you willing to sacrifice in order to be someone God can use to change the world and help get things back on His track? It is good for all of us, including me, to take a personal inventory occasionally and ask ourselves if we are still swimming upstream against the current in the world or if we are merely floating downstream with everyone else because that is easier than living according to God’s ways.
James 1:22 says that if we hear God’s Word and don’t do it, it is because we deceive ourselves through reasoning that is contrary to the truth. We know what we should do, but we find a reason to think that not doing it is all right, thereby excusing our disobedience. There should never be an excuse to disobey God.
When I become angry over something Dave has said or done, I don’t want to talk to him or even be in the same room with him, but I refuse to let my emotions control me, because I know they will lead me toward destruction. Although sometimes I need a cooling-off period, I make the decision to talk to Dave even if I don’t want to, and I refuse to avoid him, because I know division is what the devil wants.
What about your emotions? Do you let them prevent you from doing what you know you should do? If you tend to follow your emotions, you can change that today by making the decision to do so. You can feel your feelings, but you cannot follow them and be a mature Christian. Always make the decision to do what God wants you to do, and you will be victorious in life. Emotions are deceptive. Sometimes they are good, and other times they are bad. We all have them, and they will not go away. We simply need to learn how to manage them and not let them manage us.
I was thinking, no doubt, of our nights in bed, of the peculiar innocence and confidence, which will never come again, which had made those nights so delightful, so unrelated to past, present, or anything to come, so unrelated, finally, to my life since it was not necessary for me to take any but the most mechanical responsibility for them. And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one towatch, no penalties attached—it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to. Perhaps this was why, in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
[...] And I realized that my heart was beating in an awful way and that Joey was trembling against me and the light in the room was very bright and hot. I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person's body, of another person's smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find. I was very frightened; I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.
We were silent for a moment.
'Do you come in here often?' asked Giovanni suddenly.
'No,' I said, 'not very often.'
'But you will come,' he teased, with a wonderful, mocking light on his face, 'more often now?'
I stammered: 'Why?'
'Ah!' cried Giovanni. 'Don't you know when you have made a friend?'
I knew I must look foolish and that my question was foolish too: 'So soon?'
'Why no,' he said, reasonably, and looked at his watch, 'we can wait another hour if you like. We can become friends then. Or we can wait until closing time. We can become friends then. Or we can wait until tomorrow, only that means that you must come in here tomorrow and perhaps you have something else to do.' He put his watch away and leaned both elbows on the bar. 'Tell me,' he said, 'what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for?'
'Well,' I said, feeling myself being led by Giovanni into deep and dangerous water, 'I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel.'
cute
That was how I met Giovanni. I think we connected the instant that we met. And remain connected still, in spite of our later séparation de corps, despite the fact that Giovanni will be rotting soon in unhallowed ground near Paris. Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them—in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.
We were going to Les Halles for breakfast. We piled into a taxi, the four of us, unpleasantly crowded together, a circumstance which elicited from Jacques and Guillaume, a series of lewd speculations. This lewdness was particularly revolting in that it not only failed of wit, it was so clearly an expression of contempt and self-contempt; it bubbled upward out of them like a fountain of black water. It was clear that they were tantalizing themselves with Giovanni and me and this set my teeth on edge. But Giovanni leaned back against the taxi window, allowing his arm to press my shoulder lightly, seeming to say that we should soon be rid of these old men and should not be distressed that their dirty water splashed—we would have no trouble washing it away.
'I could say the same about yours,' said Jacques. 'There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.'
'Love him,' said Jacques, with vehemence, love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last? since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, hélas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty— they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.' He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. 'You play it safe long enough,' he said, in a different tone, 'and you'll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.' And he finished his cognac, ringing his glass slightly on the bar to attract the attention of Madame Clothilde.