For when allegory is at its best, it approaches myth, which must be grasped with the imagination not the intellect. If, as I still sometimes hope, my North and South and Mr. Sensible have some touch of mythical life, then no amount of 'explanation' will quite catch up with their meaning. It is the sort of thing you cannot learn from definition: you must rather get to know it as you get to know a smell or a taste, the 'atmosphere' of a family or a country town, or the personality of an individual.

C.S. Lewis. THE PILGRIM'S REGRESS. Preface.

To live a remote, retired, secluded life is the antipodes of spirituality as Jesus Christ taught it.
The test of our spirituality comes when we come up against injustice and meanness and ingratitude and turmoil, all of which have the tendency to make us spiritual sluggards. We want to use prayer and Bible reading for the purpose of retirement. We utilize God for the sake of getting peace and joy, that is, we do not want to realize Jesus Christ, but only our enjoyment of Him. This is the first step in the wrong direction.

Oswald Chambers. MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST. July 10. The Spiritual Sluggard.

With bitterness and true compunction of heart I acknowledge before Thee gross and selfish thoughts that I so often allow to enter my mind and to influence my deeds.
I confess, O God--
...that often I deceive myself as to where my plain duty lies:
that often, by concealing my real motives, I pretend to be better than I am:
...that often my affection for my friends is only a refined form of caring for myself:
that often my sparing of my enemy is due to nothing more than cowardice:
...O holy One, let the fire of Thy love enter my heart, and burn up all
this coil of meanness and hypocrisy, and make my heart as the heart of a little child.

John Baillie. A DIARY OF PRIVATE PRAYER. Seventeenth Day, Evening.

Sometimes we don't know what God wants because there are stories yet to play out and people's lives still to be impacted by yours.

Jake Colsen. SO YOU DON'T WANT TO GO TO CHURCH ANY MORE.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful." So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmologial equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now.....

The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supercedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

Chris Anderson. THE END OF THEORY: THE DATA DELUGE MAKES THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD OBSOLETE. Wired. July 08.