What would you like to hold off on?

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What would you like to hold off on? --Al

-- Al Schroeder (al.schroeder@nashville.com), January 17, 2001

Answers

Really, nothing. It's not that things are going so great for me, right now. It's just that you can't know yourself until you face your -- for want of a less cheesy word -- destiny. I usually avoid talking about my faith in web forums, but one of the most powerful images in my head comes from a sermon I heard as a child. The set-up is that a man is traveling with a heavy burden and keeps calling out for relief. Eventually, God answers his prayers and offers the man a choice of burdens -- no one gets to walk through life without a burden, God explains, but this time God will let a human choose what he will carry.

Through the course of the story, the man tries every other burden offered, and finds each of them worse than the one he started out with. The point of the sermon was that our burdens are uniquely suited to our selves.

Nietzsche makes much the same point in Also Sprach Zarathustra, but I'll spare you the details. I was convinced by the sermon when I heard it at the age of eleven. I was convinced by Nietzsche ten years later. I'd rather be me, being stuck with the things with which I am stuck, than try to carry someone else's burden.

-- Tom Dean (tsd@ogk.com), January 18, 2001.


Easy question, easy answer - - - - hold off on getting more decrepit than I already am.

-- Denver doug (ionoi@webtv.net), January 18, 2001.

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