The Calvinist's "world and life view" . . . can be summed up in four short sentences:
1. In the beginning God made the world wonderfully good.
2. Near the start, the human family brought evil into the world's awesome goodness.
3. In the end, God will come to fix his world and make it altogether good again.
4. In between, his children are to go into the world and create some imperfect models of the good world to come.
This is the Calvinism to which I was converted in college. It is the faith that has sustained my spirit ever since. I cherish it because it carries a magnificent hope inside of it. Though it brings grief that the world is as badly broken as it is, it offers hope that there is still enough goodness in the world to make it both fixable and worth fixing.
— Lewis B. Smedes, My God and I