{"id":2440,"date":"2013-04-30T13:00:55","date_gmt":"2013-04-30T17:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/?p=2440"},"modified":"2013-04-30T13:00:55","modified_gmt":"2013-04-30T17:00:55","slug":"humility-and-manhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/?p=2440","title":{"rendered":"Humility and Manhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

My boys & I recently read George MacDonald\u2019s Phantastes<\/i><\/a>. C. S. Lewis famously said this book baptized his imagination. I can\u2019t say our experience was so lofty. It is a challenging book to follow, though there are beautiful and wise comments along the way. The last portion of the book is quite good as the young man who is the main character accomplishes his quest for maturity and finds true manhood not in his conquests or his prideful pursuits but in humility, service and work.<\/p>\n

The quote below captures the point of the conclusion of the book and is worth contemplation.<\/p>\n

Then first I knew the delight of being lowly; of saying to myself, \u201cI am what I am, nothing more.\u201d \u201c\u2026 I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My boys & I recently read George MacDonald\u2019s Phantastes. C. S. Lewis famously said this book baptized his imagination. I can\u2019t say our experience was so lofty. It is a challenging book to follow, though there are beautiful and wise comments along the way. The last portion of the book is quite good as the …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Humility and Manhood’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,266,21,119],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2441,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440\/revisions\/2441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayvanneste.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}