A Glorious Dark
By A.J. Swoboda
Below are my notes and key hi-lighted passages from A Glorious Dark. (Italics = quotes from the book. Bold = my personal notes)
“Some want to suffer with Jesus; others want to be resurrected with Jesus. Few desire both.”
“Christianity doesn’t allow us to export guilt to others. It forces us to deal with our own first.”
“One of my greatest problems with the general American sentiment is that we take too high a perspective on humanity, believing that we have endless potential to progress, that we’ve evolved, that we’ve improved. I just don’t buy it. With all of our technological improvements, we are still fully broken people both inside and out. While we may be updating our human software here and there, the hard drive is as sick as it’s ever been. For such an “advanced” world, I’m shocked at all the rape, pillage, and atrocity we still manage to come up with. For being so “evolved” we seem to still be able to do deeply evil acts.”
“Perhaps the Bible is simply trying to do what nobody else down here wants to do - be honest about who we really are.”
“Contentment is impossible when you’re spending all your time comparing your cruddy life with everyone else’s “perfect” life.”
“Legalism and religiosity make God’s love frugal - you’re always on the verge of being abandoned by God because you’ve stepped over the line.”
“Faith is a journey that won’t ever cease this side of heaven; that means we’ll need to keep seeking, knocking, asking until we stop breathing.”
“We don’t want to know God as God is; we want to be entertained by a god of excitement and buzz. We want to feel God, we want to be passionate about God, we want to be crazy for God. Now, these feelings are good. God made them. But we’ve begun to worship the feelings of feeling God rather than loving God himself. We desire to be entertained by God more than we like to love God. This leads to a nasty form of Christianity, where people seek in droves and crowds the most entertaining form of Christianity out there.”
“There are two kinds of faith. Faith will either be like a Polaroid picture or an Etch-a-Sketch. They share one commonality: both will be shaken. For one, being shaken will cause faith to become clearer. For the other, shaking will cause the faith to blur and disappear. Faith should be an old-timey Polaroid - it should be clearer the more shaken it becomes. Jesus found joy and solace in his Father when life shook him. Shaking brought clarity.”
“Jesus called us to be fishers of men. That means that following Christ requires us to be as endlessly hopeful about what God’s kingdom is doing in others as we are about what God is doing in us.”
I wonder if we lived just as concerned with what God is doing in others as we are concerned with what God is doing in us if it would cause everyone to drop their guard. We’re all a work in progress. We’re very aware we are a work in progress - we often forget the people we are frustrated with are in progress as well.
“God is so understood by those who’ve experienced the death of their greatest desire. Every other view is from the back row. God is so close to those who know what loss is like.”
“Biblical belief implies a kind of trying. And if this is true, then many hold a dear catastrophic misunderstanding of the nature of faith. Many envision faith as a kind of hall pass for laziness, excusing them from a life of action, doing, and working hard. Faith like this lulls one to passively recline, let go, and let God do everything.”
“I fear this fall view of faith lets us off the responsibility of life, making us believe that we don’t have to apply for that job, don’t have to work hard in that marriage, don’t have to pay those bills - all these in the name of “faith.”
Work as if it depends on you - pray as if it depends on God. Both the work and the prayer should form in you a humility for the road in front of you.
“Faith is doing something with the life God gave you and letting God worry about the results.”
“Most of these people in the Bible at some point became depressed. Some even became suicidal. For instance, I reflect on the life of Elijah. God sent him to the people with a message about needing to return to God. He went and did his job and then ran away to save his life. Sitting under a broom bush, he asked God to kill him. Elijah prayed, “I have had enough, Lord… Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors. Then after praying he took a nap, hoping God wouldn’t let him wake up.”
The journey of life can be hard. There can and will be seasons of darkness. Having a deep faith does not exclude us from the reality of life. Having bouts of depression does not mean you aren’t doing faith “right.”