Keeping Believing Nimble

We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keep Believing nimble.

-- Emily Dickenson

Thankfulness

I have noticed...that my thankfulness is proportional to my awareness of need.

I am more thankful today, than usual. ...I think my awareness is higher.

Strength in Being Still

There is a real strength in being still.

It requires a good understanding of where our real strength is found.

Parents: On Behalf of the Diety

It is a serious mistake to think that when questions arise and doubts and rebellions are expressed, the correct strategy is an intensified publicity campaign...no parent is required to mount an advertising campaign on behalf of the Deity.

-- Eugene Peterson

Twice as well

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult.

-- Charlotte Whitton

...a perfectly funny sexist comment.

Insecurities

The goal cannot be to try not to live out of our insecurities.  This is both endless and hopeless.

The goal is to learn what we are secure in and to live out of that.

So, What is Real?

Very often when I leave a place of worship, the first impression I have of
the so-called 'outside world' is how small it is -- how puny its politics,
paltry its appetites, squint-eyed its interests.  I have just spent an hour
or so with friends reorienting myself in the realities of the world -- the
huge sweep of salvation and the minute particularities of holiness -- and I
blink my eyes in disbelief that so many are willing to live in such reduced
and cramped conditions.  But after a few hours or days, I find myself
getting used to it and going along with its assumptions.  And then some
pastor or priest calls me back to reality with 'Let us worship God', and I
get it straight again, see it whole.

Every call to worship is a call into the Real World.  You'd think that by
this time in my life I wouldn't need to be called anymore.  But I do.  I
encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality.  The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior.  The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the Eurcharist my basic food.  The reality is that baptism , not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am."

-- Eugene Peterson

Squeezing Our Nuts

I was recently troubled to learn I think like a squirrel.

A friend told me a story a while back about a squirrel he saw on the deck of his condo. He put a couple nuts out one day, and the squirrel came back the next day looking for more nuts. So he opened his sliding door, and placed a nut just inside. The squirrel studied the distance he’d have to run to get in and out of the house, then took the chance, grabbed the nut and escaped back to his tree. Each day my friend would bring the squirrel further inside the house, until, after a few weeks, he could feed the squirrel from his hand. Awesome story. Except for what happened next.

My friend decided to stop feeding the squirrel. And the squirrel...  Read on ...

-- Donald Miller

Favor

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

-- Mark Twain

Shedding Some Should

Over the last few years I have realized a 'shedding of should' and a 'wakening of want'.  If you had asked me a while back questions about what I wanted to do, I would be almost completely stopped in an unanswerable state.  I couldn't answer, in part, because I didn't seem to know.  I think I did know, but I had become so unpracticed at allowing that to be a factor in determining what I did that I didn't recognize its role in my life.  I lived primarily out of 'should'.  'What should I do?' felt like a much more answerable and important question.  I might have said something like, 'it doesn't matter what I want to do...it's what I should do that matters'.

Today, after years in the vice of 'should', I feel strangely more free from it...noting that I live much more now out of what I want to do.  I suspect this, at least in part, is due to more of an alignment between my ultimate desires to follow God and my daily ability to choose the ways to do that through the desires that He has given me.  I don't detect a conflict between should and want, as much as I did.  In some ways the two have strangely merged, often undetectibly, but from a view point-a and point-b perspective, quite obviously.

I am grateful for the relief from should and for the freedom of want.  I am glad to just be me (well, more of the time anyway).

Another Great Day at the Big House

For more great pics, click here...

Aging

The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.

-- Doug Larson

Seeing and Beleving

I tend to agree with the reverse version of the statement:

"I'll believe it, when I see it."

Many things for me have been more like:

"I'll see it, when I believe it."