E. Stanley Jones

I’m here in my study again with E. Stanley Jones. He wrote many books, all of them good books, but the best of all his books was his last, “The Divine Yes.”

Late yesterday I thought to myself, “You’ve read all these wonderful books written by your friends, but have you taken on their words, their wisdom, their examples, and lived accordingly?” The answer was and is both yes and no. 

“Brother Stanley” provided me with several things to think about today:

“Society demands conformity. If you fall below its standards, it will punish you. If you rise above its standards, it will persecute you. Jesus said, ‘Beware when all men think well of you.’”

“Yes, I have found that when life shuts one door, it opens another if you have eyes to see and initiative to follow.”

“Everyone comes from his peak to a gradual or sudden fall into old age. A…woman said to me, ‘I hate to grow old, but I feel it gradually coming upon me.’ She was going into a gradual decline, a slow aging. She didn’t like the process for she could feel the creeping paralysis of old age. There is a way to come into old age with a crash. Apparently I have come into it that way.”

“Now that I am in this crisis I face the question of living on crippled or calling it a day and accepting a passage to the other world. I am honestly indifferent as to which it shall be. I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds it. I have tried for 88 years (and in a few days it will be 89), and I have no need to live any more unless he decides.”

“Sometimes I find myself musing….Dear old body—for the past nine decades we’ve walked the dusty roads together, we’ve flown across contine

nts, and you’ve been uncomplaining even when I’ve put impossible loads upon you. Thank you for your faithful service, and now you say you’ll be faithful till death us do part. When that parting comes, I’ll look back at you and salute you and thank you, and I’ll say to you, ‘When I get my immortal body, I hope there will be a lot of you there incorporated.’ Thank you again, for everything."

(October 13, 2015)