Coketown

I’m up at 12:15 AM and I’m exhausted, but I’m writing, go figure.

I was considering how we love people and what an amazing ability that is. How amazing it is that God gives us that in the first place.

In Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times, the Gradgrinds are seemingly “immune” to the idea of love. It’s sad to imagine such a place as Coketown, monotonous and all straight-fact without any concept of “fancy.” Can you imagine a place where love is just a myth? Or somewhere where love is replaced by the knowledge of facts (“nothing but the facts, sir!”)? In this place two people weigh factual evidence and calculate percentages on why they should get married. In this place religion is a classroom full of statistics. Church pews are full of utilitarian citizens holding graphing calculators and dictionaries void of “fanciful” language or explanation of emotion. Do these people even know how to smile? If the Gradgrinds were said to laugh, I wonder if it would sound like someone playing the keys to a piano with no strings.

Well, needless to say, I love love. I’m so in love with the love God has given me. I love that He’s given me the opportunity to share it with others. And I dearly hope I will continue to do so. The fact I care to see most about it is that God loved us so much that He sent His own son to die for our sake. 

Mr. Gradgrind had "bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity" (i.e. Love) "which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck" (Bk. 1, Ch. 15). I guess the fact is that your algebra, your facts, Mr. Gradgrind, will not matter when He comes. What will matter? The Love we have for and with Jesus Christ, and the love we've shown to others.