Jared reads Charles Spurgeon's "Morning and Evening" devotions out loud at breakfast (we are only about the "morning"). I love it because I have heard that Spurg. wrote these little notes when he was completely incapacitated with depression. So they seem charged with meaning, since he must have given a supreme effort to keep writing and believing.
This morning Jared read:
"Sit not down in despair; hope on, hope ever. Take up the arms of faith against a sea of trouble, and your opposition shall yet end your distresses."
Now I KNOW you recognize that! Hamlet! The most depressed and incapacitated hero ever!
"To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?"
I love to feast my mind on Hamlet's paralysis between word and deed, thought and action (Horatio, his foil who lived on to tell his story; Fortinbras, his foil who lived on to actually do a single thing and rule Denmark). I could write a whole high school English paper on this: "The Third Way: Above Thought and Action, There is Faith" (all my high school English papers were really over the top and most had the word "depravity" in the title: "Depravity in The Shipping News," "Total Depravity in Macbeth"). So I feel free to be as paralyzed as I please. Faith is the third way out of distress.
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