relationships and community on Hesitation

Do you hesitate, man, to go this way, when this is the way that God came to you?

Too many young guys are waiting for writing in the sky before they make a relational commitment. It doesn’t have to be that complicated. My grandpa DeYoung met my grandma on his paper route. Then they...

An elderly couple lies in bed. She is not satisfied with the distance between them. She reminds him, “When we were young, you used to hold my hand in bed.” He hesitates, but in a few moments a wrinkle...

Imagine, if you will, that you work for a company whose president found it necessary to travel out of the country and spend an extended period of time abroad. So he says to you and the other trusted e...

An Admirer once asked Leonard Bernstein, celebrated orchestra conductor, what was the hardest instrument to play. He replied without hesitation: “Second fiddle. I can always get plenty of first violin...

He wonders if he’s lying. If he is, he is hung in the middle of nowhere, and the thought hollows him.

One of our main problems is that in this chatty society, silence has become a very fearful thing. For most people, silence creates itchiness and nervousness.

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on th...

The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profoun...

Conversation would be much improved by the frequent use of three words: I don’t know.

Another form of unholy unhurry that many of us have heard little about is acedia. Derived from the Greek a (for “not”) and keedos (meaning “to care”), acedia is ultimately a failure of love. It’s a pl...

I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.

Gracious, patient God, too often we don’t trust you. We don’t trust you enough to be honest with you, to share our doubts with you, or to be real with other people about our struggles. Lord, please he...

It isn’t easy to wait. It demands persistence when common sense says “give up.” It says “believe” when there is no present evidence to back it up. Faith is forged in delay. Character is forged in dela...

In the last class I taught at Regent, an obviously irritated young woman came up to me and said, “Dr. Peterson, three times during your lecture you did not say anything for twenty seconds. I know beca...

He has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

Give me chastity and continency—but not yet!

Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Before a man can do things there must be things he will not do.

Gracious God, we come before you with humility, recognizing that doubt has led our decisions. We have allowed fear to lead, rather than love. Because of this, we have been unkind to our families, our ...

Hospitality is not inviting people to our perfect homes; it is inviting them to our imperfect hearts.

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels so much like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that have become habitual…I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the ...

George Herbert Mead, an influential early 20th-century sociologist, coined the term “generalized other” to describe the vague group we consider when shaping our actions. How often do we behave a certa...

O Holy One, we call to you and name you as eternal, ever-present, and boundless in love. Yet there are times, O God, when we fail to recognize you in the dailyness of our lives. Sometimes shame clench...

In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

God intended man to have all good, but in . . . God’s time; and therefore all disobedience, all sin, consists essentially in breaking out of time. Hence the restoration of order by the Son of God ha...

Shame has two conflicting instincts. It needs to isolate and hide, and it needs a community in which to be transparent. Hiding, of course, usually wins. It is the easier and more natural of the two. B...