Sharing quotes from the book and there was light, the autobiography of Jacques Lucan. I know French people and I should have asked them about this, but I'm trying to just knock this out. So I apologize if I'm saying that wrong in this quote. Let me find it. Ah, um, he's, he's been in the concentration
camp for a while and uh, uh these are just sample quotes. You really should read the book. There's more in it than I'm sharing. Um, let me make sure I have the right. Sorry, I had to just read these two pages. Speed reading is wonderful. Um So he says, so people are being executed left and right. He
says in the meantime, I was alive even that was hard because this kind of living was not at all. Like what you used to call life outside. You had to give up your individuality. It would have been in your way like clothes when you were swimming. If you ever swam in clothes, I realize this might be a weird
experience you might. So in the army, we had to go through this training where they threw us into a pool and we were in our full uniforms and I believe we had a dummy M-16 as well and, or a backpack and we were wearing boots. He was crazy. It's actually kind of fun. Uh, this wouldn't be fun that what
he's referring to, obviously. But if, if it were a survival situation, you, you really don't wanna be in your clothes because they fill with water and there's a lot of drag and so it's harder to stay afloat when you're wearing clothes. That's the point. Um Never forget that the enemy has every right
over you the right to kill or not to kill you to dress or undress you to befoul you. The only thing to do is to think about it as little as possible to think of your comrades who are enduring. The same thing I had to remember that I for one had finished for the time being with my beautiful new identity
as a blind, young intellectual. Now, I was the prisoner in cell 49 in the second division. So this isn't kind of an echo of the last quote. Um This idea of losing complete, sorry, completely losing autonomy. I didn't say that in the last video. So this isn't really a repeat, but it's a nice little facet
, another angle of a related idea and you may or may not see the connection without me explaining it to you. So here we go. You don't. Well, the, the saying goes, you don't know what you've got until it's gone. Right. Autonomy is like this. And I think for most humans, they don't sort of wake up to what
this is like or that it's possible or how much it hurts them until they lose it through age or accident. There are others who lose it far earlier, uh, due to getting busted for some crime or something, getting canceled. Um, so, um, I've actually been through this many times now in my life, which is crazy
. I'm 39 years old. I've been through this physically through chronic illness and injury. I've been through this Vocationally more than once, uh through um through other means that I can't really describe adequately. So I won't try. But you, I think it's, it's hard for an in, it's hard for an individual
to realize to what extent they have not surrendered fully to God while they have any autonomy left. And so being in a situation like this, it strips away all of the barriers to seeing how you really are and how dependent you really are on thinking you're in control. And so I think one of the greatest
blessings that can happen to someone is to be stripped down and uh and beaten for something that is not that they didn't do because um, I don't know, I was just exchanging an email with someone and we were talking about the necessity of experience and learning and in Hebrews, it says that Jesus learn
by what he suffered, he learned obedience by what he suffered. And I don't think that that's an adequate way of describing what Paul was trying to say. I would say something like Jesus learned the value of submitting to the father through what he suffered because it's in that suffering that you learn
how things really are and you learn what it means that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. And you realize, I don't know that there's another way to realize whether you are yoked to him or not because when you're yoked to him, no matter what happens to you, you know that he's by your side rather
that you're by his side, which is very important, very different. You're by his side and that no matter what's stripped away from you, on the outside or what's inflicted upon you, you're one in him and he is one in you. And that has more value than anything that can be taken away here.