one really good book

we're stuck on eric metaxas, now reading his bio on william wilberforce, after finishing bonhoeffer.

these biographies are perfectly timed with writing our book, because they inspire and spur on a fight through laziness or fear or doubt.

"wilberforce alone knew how constitutionally weak he was with regard to self-discipline. and he knew that his years at pocklington and cambridge had powerfully reinforced his worst tendencies, feeding them when they should have been starved. while his friend Pitt had been at the very elbow of his brilliant and accomplished father, who had taken it upon himself to train his son rigorously from earliest youth to be a great orator and politician, wilberforce had been fatherless and had been encouraged by his friends and his mother, and even by his tutors, to do exactly as he pleased. so where pitt was now reaping ample rewards of all those years of paternal sternness, wilberforce was an undisciplined mess who had gotten where he was precisely and only because of the raw talent that he possessed but had never cultivated one whit. for the rest of his life, he would pay a price for those idle years...all of this was shown to him now in these months; he saw, so to speak, the full horror of himself. God, in his mercy, had allowed wilberforce to see himself as he truly was, and it was crushing. but wilberforce knew God didn't mean to end there. on the other side of the worst of who he was, if he dared face that worst, was a God who would help him overcome his faults and do great things, the very things for which he had created him. It was not too late."