Not Quitting Isn’t a Skill

 

Bear Grylls, on his social media, speaks to one of the most important realities of being able to succeed at virtually anything in this life:

“The best piece of advice I ever received about resilience didn't come from a book.

It came from the first SAS officer I ever met.

I was crazy nervous before Selection. I didn't know if I was strong enough or fit enough to make it.

He pulled me aside and said:

"Everyone who attempts Selection has the basic mark-one body: two arms, two legs, one head, and one pumping set of lungs."

Then he tapped his chest.

"What makes the difference between those who make it and those who don't is what goes on in here. Heart. That is what makes the big difference."

Skills can be taught.

Fitness can be built.

But heart? That's a choice you make every single day.

When people around you are quitting, make that the reason to give more.

Have a great Wednesday. Take care of each other.”

Amen. This is true in so many areas of life:

Family

Career

Ministry

Writing goals

Etc, etc.

Not quitting is not a skill, it is a decision. It is a decision you make every day, in fact more than that. You might have to talk yourself out of quitting your job, your marriage or your ministry many times in a single day. And it is worth the effort to do this, because once you come through the time of trial you will have been transformed in ways that you would not have, if you had quit.

Whenever someone quits something they were determined to succeed at, it leaves a mark on them. That does not mean there are never times to stop trying with something. I worked out very quickly into my PhD studies that I did not need a doctorate in theology, that I did not want to work in academia (especially after I had seen what it was really like in today’s world), and that I could better use my research and writing skills in other ways, which I have. So, I understand that there are times when we do not need to complete something. But this decision left a mark on me, it helped me to understand more about myself, and because I took what I have worked on and turned it into a book I could publish it left a positive mark.

But when people quit something they really wanted to succeed at and leave behind them nothing but loss, it leaves a different kind of mark. We all have that from some point in our lives. I think every now and then about what would have been different in my life if I kept pursuing footy. Probably not a lot, however I will never know for sure. But when it comes to a marriage, or an important vocation, when you look at people who have quit these, then you see how much it can harm their path forward. It leaves a mark that they carry with them the rest of their lives, a negative mark. Because they made a decision to quit, when they know they should have kept going.

This decision to quit damages their resilience to other situations in their life. It leaves them with a mark of failure, and they know it. Of course, to a large degree they can heal and succeed at other things, but the mark will stay with them.

Whereas sticking at something when it is hard helps us to learn the strength to face other difficult things. But, as I said, this is not a skill, it is a decision. It is decision to want to keep going.  

My kids see me do some form of exercise everyday. Everyday, unless I am sick, of course. I said to them the other day, do you think I always feel like exercising everyday? One them answered yes. But I said, that of course I don’t want to, I’d rather rest, and not have to worry about exercising, but how else am I supposed to stay strong?

We have to make the decision to keep at something. I encourage you today to think about this.

 

 

Relearn It, We Must

 

Her divorce may not have been her fault. Though most divorces are initiated by women, so she likely took the plunge. Still  he might have been intolerable, and I don't mean that he was messy, and forgot her birthday a few times, and watched too much sport on the weekend. I mean he might have been a down right mongrel. So, there is that possibility.

But the reality is divorce has been too easy for too long. Waaaaaaaay too easy.

Most people divorce over minor issues. Normal relational issues. Even for more serious ones, like infidelity, people used to be more willing to piece things back together (which of course is hard to do, I understand). But now divorce is as simple for some people as changing cars. In fact some people keep their cars, longer than spouses.

Our government and our culture made divorce way too easy, and now God had decided to take that ease away.

Those who don't learn from wisdom learn from experience. He is making our easy going, way too easy to blow up marriage culture, experience much more hardship.

The young will look upon this, and fear, and recognize that you cannot just treat things like marriage as throwaway things. They will likely be made wise by the experiences of others.

It sucks, though, how many people will be hurt by our society relearning this lesson. But learn it we must.

It’s Better To Have…

 

Marriage failure is not the worst thing that can happen to a young man in the relationship scene.

Never having had a chance to live your life with the woman you love is far worse.

Even if it were to fail, you would have gained so much from that marriage. Even some kids, probably. And a lot of other good things if you approached it well.

Too many young men today, because of bad, mad, social media advice fear the wrong thing. They fear that their relationship might fail, rather than fearing that they never took the chance to succeed.

They fear more that they might lose half their assets, rather than consider that they built something with another person. Which is one of life’s greatest privileges.

Now, of course a marriage break up is not fun. This is true no matter which side initiates it. I have seen enough divorced people in my life, through my ministry, to see that many of them have the same look of woundedness, the same shattering of confidence, the same presence that speaks to a great personal failure. Some display this less than others, some more, but I have observed it in all of them at some point. So, I would never say that a marriage failure is not awful.

But the person who has never pursued a relationship with a woman they are interested in has to live with a deeper wound: they lived the life of a coward, and that is worse, much worse, than even a marriage failure. Don’t let it happen to you.

 

Degrading Art Degrades A Society

 

I am looking forward to seeing how all the usual big-eva crowd pump out article, after article, and social media post after social media post, about how Translan is actually a good thing, it is only a small part of the movie, and then promoting some feminist spin on the story. Which is exactly what they did with similar issues in the recent travesty that is called Nolan's The Odyssey.

Of course, they will only do this if the movie turns out to be successful, because then they can ride the wave of popularity. There are so many leaders in the church who are so desperate to seek the approval and aplomb of the left-leaning culture. Or, others will promote it because some of them are paid to shill for it, because this does happen as well.

This is the level of disrespect our society gives to Christian things, when Christians take disrespect and tell everyone else to lap it up.

The way they got behind the subversion of the Odyssey will encourage more travesties like that.

To those who say, "It is just a movie." Do you still not understand how important art is to the soul of the culture? The greatest work of art in history, bar none, is the Bible. It has spawned countless lesser works of art, all to some degree reflecting its glory. These works of art speak to grander truths that shape how a people thinks about itself. It is a well known historical field of study that art reflects the state of a society, and our society is clearly not in good shape.

There are few more successful ways to demoralize a culture than humiliate it through art. This was practiced by the Soviets who founded a massive movie industry in Communist Russia, but this has been known since ancient days. The Assyrians used art to crush the fighting spirit of their enemies. Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome, all used it to inspire their societies to greatness. There is a reason conquering armies always smashed the artworks of conquered peoples, it is a way of tearing out their hearts.

In fact, one of the worst things about evangelical culture is how bad it is at producing art. It was not always this way, once we had great artists, Lewis was one of them. But somehow the spirit of artistry has vacated the Protestant churches. The result has been an inability to capture the heart of society.

And now they are in the process off degrading the legacy of our greatest Christian artists.

 

Feminists Were Always Crazy

 

Because we live in a day and age where bad hair dye jobs have caught up with feminist sensibilities, we tend to think that earlier waves of feminists were more reasonable, and more sensible.

But no, the first wave feminists were not the saner feminists. As Helen Kendrick Johnson writes in the 1890’s:

“I copy from the "Salt Lake Herald" a few sentences taken from an interview with Mrs. Cannon, State Senator elect. When asked if she was a strong believer in woman suffrage, she answered: "Of course I am. It will help women, and it will purify politics. Women are better than men. Slaves are always better than their masters." "Do you refer to polygamy?" was asked. "Indeed I do not," she answered. "I believe in polygamy. My father and mother were Mormons, and I am a Mormon…. A plural wife isn't half as much of a slave as a single wife. If her husband has four wives, she has three weeks of freedom every single month…. Of course it is all at an end now, but I think the women of Utah think, with me, that we were better off in polygamy…. Sixty per cent. of the voters of this State are women. We control the State…. What am I going to do with my children while I am making the laws for the State? The same thing I have done with them when I have been practicing medicine. They have been left to themselves a good deal…. Some day there will be a law compelling people to have no more than a certain amount of children, and the mothers of the land can live as they ought to live." This is the character and opinion presented by the highest State official that woman suffrage has as yet given to the United States. Comment upon it seems unnecessary, so far as it would be needed to express the disgust of the majority of American women at such sentiments and such a situation.”

From Woman and the Republic, Helen Kendrick Johnson.

Insanity was always a mark of feminism.

There are many things that I could draw out from this short passage quoted here, but this stands out the most for me, “What am I going to do with my children while I am making the laws for the State? The same thing I have done with them when I have been practicing medicine. They have been left to themselves a good deal….” Why do you think Paul said that older women need to teach younger women “to love their husbands, to love their children” (Titus 2:4)? Because, if they are not taught this women will quickly abandon their children to follow their careers and desires. Paul saw this in his day, we see it in our day, this woman brags about doing this.

Feminism was always an attack on the family. It is dyscivilisational. It is to individualism what petrol is to a grass fire on a hot day, an extremely dangerous accelerant. People were already selfish, sinful, and given to going their own way, this is a part of the sinful human nature, the flesh corrupts our approach to life. But feminism took that and supercharged it, for women and men. Now, we live in a hyper-individualistic culture that sees any containment by gender roles and duty as oppression. But the individual is not the basic unity of society, the family is. Feminism was always, from the very start, simply a means for bad women to seek to sunder themselves from their God-given roles and responsibilities and also be given the chance to bring many other women along with them.

Now, we live in a day where so many men and women live adrift in a broken culture, and this ideology is one of the core reasons for that.

 

 

Hardship is Coming

 

The first round of record oil prices earlier this year burnt through oil reserves of many countries and also through the financial buffers of many people and companies.

This round?

It will break people.

In the 1970's the world oil markets were sent into major shock, because the US chose to support Israel over all the Arab oil producing countries, after they demanded Israel surrender land it took in a war. So, those countries strangled the world of oil. This started the fuel efficiency and green energy target movements. Rather than stay out of Middle Eastern affairs, the US decided to back its greatest ally and try to invent new technology instead of humbly accepting it did not rule the world. The whole world suffered as a result. There was mass inflation in the West, mass starvations across the third world, and industry after industry died and was offshored because energy became too expensive for things to be made in the West. Because the US used its power the way it did.

Now it is doing something very similar.

Fuel prices were dropping just a couple of months back. But then the war was re-escalated. Now we are all paying the economic price for the hubris of one country believing it has the right to determine what should happen far away from its borders.

I have been encouraging people to prepare cheaper transport, and pay down debt, as this war was always destined to escalate. This stupid, unnecessary, and completely avoidable war, is going to strangle many places of the basic resources they need to function.

Hence, much of how we lived will now be stripped away, by pure cost. Are you prepared to cut back? Have you been preparing? Are you ready to help others?

We can't change what foolish leaders in charge of foreign governments do. We can't get through the thick skulls of the religiously retarded ON BOTH SIDES that support this war because of bad theology and bad religion. We can't even look forward to good, responsible government from our own national leaders, as they have been working hard to make us exposed to this exact sort of problem, and have ignored every warning that this kind of energy crisis was inevitable.

But we can cut back and prepare to help people around us. Both these approaches will be increasingly important in coming months.

Are you prepared for coming economic hardship, because I believe we are about to see economic problems really escalate.

There is No Perfect Time

 

Vox Day notes on his Sigma Game Substack about the passivity of Delta males,

“But the passivity and reactive behavior of the Delta is absolutely within their control. If there is one thing I have observed that seems to hold Deltas back more than anything else, it is their narcissistic desire to have the universe time everything according to their preferences. They simply don’t seem to understand the concept of a window of opportunity.

Sure, it’s important to finish a task already underway. But does the task absolutely need to be finished now? The task will still be there tomorrow, the three women at the bar will not.

There is a reason why carpe diem has remained valid and relevant for more than 20 centuries. It is because most people simply don’t, even when they have the ability to do so.

So remember, the right moment is always now.”[1]

This is so true.

I have seen this sort of thing so many times.

Don’t wait for opportunities, make them. Take advantage of the opportunities that come your way. Never wait for the perfect moment, life is not a movie.

This is how so many young men today remain single well into their 30’s wondering why they still are. It is simple, in a lot of cases, you were so single-mindedly focused on some particular task, that you were likely doing very well, that you did not realize that the pretty woman who kept asking your help or your opinion needed neither of those things, but kept coming back anyway…she was seeking to get your attention, and you completely looked past it.

Or, you might have noticed it, but you were waiting for the right moment to ask her out, and never did, and finally someone else took their chance and you are left out in the cold.

I have seen a woman pine after a man and then marry his friend, because the friend actually asked her out, and that won her over. She did not jilt the other man, because he never said a word to her, because the time was not yet right.

I have seen a beautiful woman working alongside single men, a woman who is still single long after it makes any reasonable sense why, because these men never felt the time was right to ask her out. Thank God for this too, in one situation, because my wife was one such woman, and I saw her and took my opportunity straight away.

This principle is really true in many aspects of life, not just relationships. But this is the area where many men just keep shooting themselves in the foot.

There is no perfect time, at least not in most people’s situations. There is just windows of opportunity, and closed doors. Take your opportunities, what have you got to lose?

List of References

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[1] https://substack.com/home/post/p-215643412