This is part two of sharing some various ponderings that I’ve scribbled into Evernote. As with part one, I present them in hope of stirring with you further ponderings.

• If the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, then Heaven shall be the fulfillment of our very being. Hell, however, will be the desolation of one’s being, the hollowing out of one’s telos, an unmaking, an eternal nonexistent existence. 
• The kingdom is a seed, a tree that grows strong and tall. Yet plants must be tended to, pruned, watered, fertilized. Old leaves die; new leaves form. Too often, however, we desire the kingdom to be a plastic decorative plant instead. Regardless of the beauty and craft, plastic will never live. It can only ever be a counterfeit. Likewise, however lovely we make them appear, a life without growth, pruning, and the water of the Word is not life of the kingdom. It can only ever be a counterfeit faith. 
• A wise historian is often mistaken for a prophet. 
• If two or more Christians are together and it is not discipleship, they are in sin.
• It is no accident that the “sexually free” culture of Corinth required Paul both to condemn unfettered sex with prostitutes and warn against depriving one’s spouse of sex. Removed from its foundation, sex easily is able to become both everything and nothing, cancerous and dead, infecting all things and nonexistent. 
• Obtaining comfort in both life and death does not require vast storehouses of hidden knowledge. It requires knowing three things: “First, the greatness of my sin and misery. Second, how I am redeemed from all my sins and miseries. Third, how I am to be thankful to God for such redemption” (This is the answer to Question 2 of the Heidelberg Catechism). Praise the Lord that His yoke is easy and His burden is light! 
• Self-denial very often leads to gratification in the long run. Lose your life to keep it, or lose it by keeping it. 
• Why does the Bible demand that we know history? Most obviously because the Bible is set within history, because the Bible is history. Yet by being history, the Bible also validates the necessity of history. If we immerse ourselves within the pages upon which lives pass by at a mention, we must rightly feel small. We must feel brief, transient. We are reminded that we are not nearly as important as we think we are, and yet we will also leave long-lasting consequences whenever we are gone. A sense of history (and the Bible is the realest sense of it) is both exalting and diminishing. 
• The chief problem with Hollywood blockbusters being our cultural narratives, our shared stories, is that they are far too small and limited. 
• Finding the right words when writing typically involves two scenarios that are often mistaken to be the same. First, we can begin with a somewhat vague concept, so attempting to find the right words requires the thought to be brought into precision. Second, we can begin with a perfectly clear concept within our minds (frequently like a memory or experience), and the difficulty then becomes the vagueness of words themselves to capture such nuance.