One of my endeavors for 2014 was to read Looking Unto Jesus, the magnum opus of Isaac Ambrose. I planned for slow, meditative reading, but LUJ was far too good to put down. Thus, the Ambrose endeavor is now complete.

Here then I stand on the precipice of 2014’s second month wondering if I should add another endeavor to the list. The next eleven months offer open vistas of opportunity, growth, and challenge. The small shouting voice in my soul proclaims, “Go big or go home!” So I endeavor to go big with Boston; Thomas Boston that is.

I endeavor to read the collected works of Thomas Boston in 2014.

Boston was one of the subjects of my thesis, This is Not the End: Puritans on the Glory of Heaven, and I found him to be unusually illuminating. But perhaps the greatest motivation for this endeavor is found in Andrew Thomson’s description of the man from Ettrick:

If Scotland had been searched during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, there was not a minister within its bounds who, alike in personal character, and in the discharge of his pastoral function, approached nearer the apostolic model than did this man of God. It is a fact that, even before he died, men and children had come to pronounce his name with reverence. It had become a synonym for holy living.

“A synonym for holy living,” now that is an endeavor worth much prayer and pursuit.