Good Friday

I am studying for my class on Sunday. This week I will be teaching on the life of John Bunyan who really was everything that was good about the Puritans. But his life had such a thick vein of suffering running through it.
Teaching a class on the Puritans has been enlightening in a number of ways. It has been sort of like when you get glasses for the first time when you need them and you put them on and suddenly the world is clearer than you could have imagined. Some Puritans were very good. Some of the long lasting legacies of the movement were one of the great gifts of history. Some of the Puritans were about as evil as humans can be. At the very least there were a good portion who fell into very unhealthy thought and behavior patterns. And some of those legacies are some of the worst curses of history. I highly recommend deeply studying the Puritans to everyone out there. There is so much more to the movement and the people involved than you think. There is much wisdom to be mined.
Right, I was talking about veins of suffering on the night of Good Friday. No matter who you are, you will suffer more in the future unless, I don't know, a stray bullet hits you in the brain right now. That being highly unlikely, made even more so by the fact that you just read those words and how creepy would that be for the cops to find on your computer screen in front of your corpse, you will most likely suffer. My condolences. This is why it behooves us to, as Bunyan might put it, to strive for the narrow gate which leads to God, the only constant, the only inperishable, and the source of all good. All else is so much kindling.
I should shut up before I reveal my whole class before I teach it. Just a few thoughts while Laurie is out there reading Warren Ellis of all things.