quote for the weekend

dudes! 10 year high school reunion today. we had lunch at a park near here and then we're going to do dinner at Dave & Buster's. It's so crazy seeing people who were such good friends ten years ago but then sorta disappeared. b thinks my "storge" love is so strong that i almost have to have these people be significant to me wherever they are. i totally do want to be in their lives again. but i'm not sure why--i'm not sure i'd have anything in common with them. but that sense of a shared past is so significant to me.... Speaking of the four loves: i'd quote from that, but i think i have one last Jacques Ellul post before I retire this book for a while. It was a great book, but so intense. I know I'd have a hard time reading his stuff daily. "There is one very important truth which needs to be stressed:namely, that such research [into the cultural direction of the world] is necessarily a corporate act. It is impossible for an isolated Chrstian to follow this path. I believe, in fact, that one of the essential conditions for its realization is the substitution of a tru solidarity among Christians (a solidarity--voluntearily created by obedience to the will of God) for the sociological solidarity, purely mechanical in character, which is being dinned into our ears, and which people want to make the basis of the new world. In order to undertake this search for a new style of life, every Christian ought to feel and to know that heis supported by others, not only for spiritual and ideological reasons...but also for purely material reasons.... So long as the solidarity between Christians is not expressed in mutual help, which will permit everyone to find a balanced life, to discover a style of life that truly expresses his faith (and not in order to avoid starving), it will only be a matter of words." --Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom, 2nd ed. (1989). pp. 123-124.