undivided

Lord, teach me how you want me to live. Then I will follow your truth.

Give me a heart that doesn't want anything more than to worship you.

Psalm 86:11

Signs of a divided heart- restlessness, boredom, anger, depression, anxiety, lack of joy and peace- are everywhere you look. God longs for our whole heart to be fixed upon him. For all that he has done for us, he so deserves all of our love and devotion.

Something I am terribly guilty of- trying to control my own life and clean up my own messes. My pride and sense of self so often get in the way of surrendering my heart and life to the one who formed me! He doesn't want us to wait until we "have it all-together" before we come to him. He wants us as we are- unraveling, joyful, discouraged, hopeful, doubting, angry. He pleads with his children,

Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly.

Matthew 11:28

The threads of my life most often seem to me like a messy knot, but these are the very threads that bind me to God. Rather than trying to get all the cords untangled, I just need to believe that God has the other end of the threads and, if I allow him to, is weaving something that will be for my good and His glory.

 What Does An Undivided Heart Look Like?

It will show itself in a single-minded character. This is a person whose main goal, main purpose, and main passion is God. That means we live to please the one we love in everything we do. It does not mean we won't mess this up at times, it just means that He is our main love and we pursue Him.

The Lord said of David,"this is a man after my own heart."(Acts 13:22) David!? Really!? Didn't he commit adultery and then have the woman's husband killed when she came up pregnant? Didn't he allow his son to go unpunished when he raped his sister? THIS is a man after God's own heart? Yeah, he is. Why?

Read what David says over and over in the Psalms. He grieves over his sins because he knows He has hurt the God who loves him. Even though he has sinned greatly, he still seeks after God, loves Him and wants to please Him.

That is an undivided heart. It still messes up- sometimes on a big scale- but it repents over how it has affected the relationship with the God who loves so fiercely. And this heart gets back on track.

(taken from  here)

muse

 

"Listen  to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.
In the  boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness:
touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because
in the last analysis all moments are key moments,
and life itself is grace."

Frederick Buechner

 

"By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet."

Thomas Merton

"The soul which has come into intimate contact with God in the silence of the prayer chamber is never out of conscious touch with the Father; the heart is always going out to Him in loving communion, and the moment the mind is released from the task upon which it is engaged, it returns as naturally to God as the bird does to its nest."

E.M. Bounds

“Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness.

A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.”

  Frederick Buechner 

"It is good to renew ourselves, from time to time, by closely examining the state of our souls, as if we had never done it before; for nothing tends more to the full assurance of faith, than to keep ourselves by this means in humility, and the exercise of all good works."

John Wesley

the Source

When we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the Source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible but not relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft and true witnesses without being manipulative.

inconsolable

"Sometimes I wake, and, lo! I have forgot,
And drifted out upon an ebbing sea!
My soul that was at rest now resteth not,
For I am with myself and not with thee;
Truth seems a blind moon in a glaring morn,
Where nothing is but sick-heart vanity:
Oh, thou who knowest! save thy child forlorn.

Thy fishes breathe but where thy waters roll;
Thy birds fly but within thy airy sea;
My soul breathes only in thy infinite soul;
I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee.
Oh breathe, oh think,--O Love, live into me;
Unworthy is my life till all divine,
Till thou see in me only what is thine.

When I no more can stir my soul to move,
And life is but the ashes of a fire;
When I can but remember that my heart
Once used to live and love, long and aspire,
Oh, be thou then the first, the one thou art;
Be thou the calling, before all answering love,
And in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire."

-The Diary of An Old Soul, George MacDonald

"We are desire. It is the essence of the human soul, the secret of our existence. Absolutely nothing of human greatness is ever accomplished without it. Not a symphony has been written, a mountain climbed, an injustice fought, or a love sustained apart from desire. Desire fuels our search for the life we prize. Our desire, if we will listen to it, will save us from committing soul-suicide, the sacrifice of our hearts on the altar of 'getting by.' The same old thing is not enough. It never will be."

-Desire, John Eldredge

"Wilt thou suddenly enshroud thee,
Who this moment wert so nigh?
Heavy rising masses cloud thee,
Thou art hidden from mine eye.
Yet my sadness thou well knowest,
Gleaming sweetly as a star!
That I'm loved, 'tis thou that showest,
Though my loved one may be far.
Upward mount then! clearer, milder,
Robed in splendour far more bright!
Though my heart with grief throbs wilder,
Fraught with rapture is the night!"
-To the Rising Full Moon, Goethe

"We are made in the image of God; we carry within us the desire for our true life of intimacy and adventure. To say we want less than that is to lie."

-Desire, John Eldredge

"Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."

-Oscar Wilde

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country,
the place where I ought to have been born."
-C.S.Lewis

"Indeed, if we will listen, a Sacred Romance calls to us through our heart every moment of our lives. It whispers to us on the wind, invites us through the laughter of good friends, reaches out to us through the touch of someone we love. We've heard it in our favorite music, sensed it in the birth of our first child, been drawn to it while watching the shimmer of the sunset on the ocean. The Romance is even present in times of great personal suffering: the illness of a child, the loss of a marriage, the death of a friend.
Something calls to us through experiences like these and rouses in us an inconsolable longing deep within our heart, wakening in us a yearning for intimacy, beauty, adventure.

This longing is the most powerful part of any human personality. It fuels our search for meaning, for wholeness, for the sense of being truly alive. However we may describe this deep desire, it is the most important thing about us, our heart of hearts, the passion of our life. And the voice that calls to us in this place is none other than the voice of God."

-The Sacred Romance, Brent Curtis & John Eldredge

 

music

 

 

  

 

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver

 

Very early on, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.

-Margaret Fuller

Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.

-May Sarton

‘The angels,’ he said, ‘have no senses; their experience is purely intellectual and spiritual. That is why we know something about God which they don’t. There are particular aspects of His love and joy which can be communicated to a created being only by sensuous experience. Something of God which the Seraphim can never quite understand flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.

-C. S. Lewis

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

- Henry David Thoreau 

 

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

- Mark Twain

some haunting quality. . .

An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed with beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person.
- Thomas Moore

with an ear close

Big Black Car - Gregory Alan Isakov from Todd Roeth on Vimeo.

you were a phonograph, i was a kid
i sat with an ear close, just listening
i was there when the rain tapped her way down you face
you were a miracle…i was just holdin your space

well time has a way of throwing it all in your face
the past, she is haunted, the future is laced
heartbreak, ya know, drives a big black car
swear i was in the back seat, just minding my own

and through the glass, the corn crows come like rain
they won’t stay, they won’t stay
for too long now

this could be all that we know..
of love and all.

well you were a dancer, i was a rag
the song in my head, well was all that i had
hope was a letter i never could send
love was a country we couldn’t defend.

and through the carnival we watch them go round and round
all we knew of home was just a sunset and some clowns

well you were a magazine, i was a plane jane
just walking the sidewalks all covered in rain
love to just get into one of your stories
just me and all of my plane jane glory

the longing

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing— to reach the mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from— my country, the place where I ought to have been born.
-C.S.Lewis

wake

"Thirsty hearts are those whose longings have been wakened by the touch of God within them."

-A.W. Tozer

"Romance is the deepest thing in life, romance is deeper even than reality."

-G.K. Chesterton

"To want is to suffer; the word passion means to suffer."

-John Eldredge

"We wake, if ever we wake at all, to mystery."

-Annie Dillard

that something

"Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of- something not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through; the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling  (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it- tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself- you would know it.

Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all."

-C.S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain

this longing for home

"In order to keep us from becoming too attached to earth, God allows us to feel a significant amount of discontent and dissatisfaction– longings that will never be fulfilled on this side of eternity. We’re not completely happy here because we’re not supposed to be. Earth is not our final home; we were created for something much better. A fish would never be happy living on land, because it was made for water. And eagle could never feel satisfied if it wasn’t allowed to fly. You will never feel completely satisfied on earth, because you were made for more. You will have happy moments here, but nothing compared with what God has planned for you."

-Rick Warren

"Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

-C.S. Lewis

all

Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

– C.S. Lewis

The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says, “Give me ALL. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want YOU. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked – the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: My own will shall become yours.”

It is like that here. The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self – all your wishes and precautions – to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call “ourselves,” to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be “good.” We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way-centered on money or pleasure or ambition-and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.

-Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis

dream

 We each have a dream, a vision of life that corresponds to our convictions, embodies our uniqueness, and expresses what is life-giving within us. Whether altruistic or ignoble, the dream gives definition to our lives, influences the decisions we make, the steps we take, the words we speak. Daily we make choices that that are either consistent with or contrary to our vision. A life of integrity is born of fidelity to the dream.
- Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

J.M.W. Clarke plays Chopin's Raindrops Prelude Op.28 No.15 in D-flat

  

A Room Called Remember, Frederick Buechner

"The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived."

crash

a thin wisp

It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?

— Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts:
Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road

God of surprises

Whitney Balliett authored a marvelous book on jazz titled The Sound of Surprise. In it, he talks about the unpredictability of jazz. With jazz, the listener never knows what's coming next—the rhythms, the harmonies, the improvs—and this unpredictability makes it exciting. Jazz always seems to surprise us.

So it is with life and work. The only certainty is change, and change always comes as a surprise. We may be able to predict that change is coming, but we can't predict the details of its unfolding. The good surprises that God sends are often commonplace and ordinary. Unfortunately, we don't allow them to surprise us. Instead, we live in dread of the bad surprises. We want to anticipate them somehow, to be one step ahead, to be in control.

Of course, it is wise to prepare ourselves for the bad surprises in life, but we shouldn't overlook God's hand in every surprise. And we must be careful not to let our expectations get in the way. Much of the joy in our lives will be determined by how we react, and our reactions can make the difference between a life of joy and a life of fearful dread.

Remember the story of Paul and Silas sitting in jail one night? Perhaps both men were tempted to give up, go to sleep, and forget about the bad surprise of jail. Instead, Paul and Silas turned God's surprise into singing. That's when the night really got exciting. Jail doors opened, a guard almost killed himself, and a community reached a spiritual turning point. What might have been a night of despair turned into a night of wonderful surprises (Acts 16).

Unfortunately, by our very nature, we tend to face life with one eye looking over our shoulder. We all experience betrayal at some point in our lives. We all learn that bad surprises can be dangerous.

How do we guard against the bad surprises without becoming slaves to fear? How do we continue to recognize and appreciate God's surprises in the commonplace? Most people want to think in terms of complex formulas and rules. In reality, it's really a simple formula. Our joy starts with faith and ends with thanksgiving. You see, we need a certain amount of faith to wake up to the good surprises of God. Cultivate alertness. Jesus kept telling his disciples, "Watch!" Pay attention! See all the good stuff! Gratitude requires faith, and faith produces thankfulness. Ingratitude is every day's atheism; God ignored is God denied.

When we live with gratitude—and an adequate humility—we are constantly surrounded by awe. A lot of the awe and wonder in life comes from looking for surprises. But surprises to us are never surprises to God. Christ's resurrection is the Great Surprise. That's why:
"All things work together for good to them who love God"

(Rom. 8:28).

-Howard Butt, Jr.

something waits beneath

"I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future- the timelessness of the rocks and the hills- all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape- the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show." 
Andrew Wyeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Winter is an etching,

spring a watercolor,

summer an oil painting,

and autumn a mosaic of them all."

Stanley Horowitz

vino

one of my favorite zinfandels
is Bogle Winery's... and they do one of the coolest things!
on each of their corks is a unique quote:

"He who loves not wine, women and song remains a fool his whole life long."
Martin Luther

"In water one sees one's own face;
But in wine one beholds the heart of another."
French proverb

"What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?"
W.C. Fields

"Over the wine-dark sea."
Homer, Iliad, I. 350

"Wine is bottled poetry."
Robert Louis Stevenson

........ 

WINEMAKER NOTES:

Head-trained and dry farmed vines continue to be the source for Bogle’s Old Vine Zinfandel. These gnarly old vines produce concentrated fruit of unsurpassed quality and intensity. This full-bodied vintage shows itself with rich black raspberry notes that round out in the mouth, accompanied by the scents of summer fruit jam bubbling on the stove. Juniper berry and cinnamon stick join the spiciness of red and black peppercorns as they integrate with the supple fruit and lead toward the finish. Toasty oak and cloves are the perfect finishing touch.

stewing

i find myself alone, holed in my delightfully cozy kitchen on this wintry sunday afternoon. today, i am venturing to make one of my seasonal-favorites-  mexican chili. yum. my recipe seems to be always ever-slightly changing, yet each time it is just as i hope it will turn out :)

the ingredients.....

seasoning.....

now it cooks for hours,
filling the house with the most delightful aroma!

the end result.....

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: 'Ye were bought at a price', and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God."

"Music... will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you."

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

 

"The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this. In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness. The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ."

"There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve -- even in pain -- the authentic relationship. Further more, the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain."

alert and oriented times zero

what can be done, no, what can be said
when pain strikes so deeply that you lose all sense of orientation.
when life has chipped away at your very self with so much dedication
that you find one day, you are broken to pieces.
how do you regain heart when your heart is no longer beating.
how do you feel anything at all when you've been numb
for so long that you don't remember how to feel.
you think that healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, and love are great things-
in theory.
great things you yourself once possessed, and even exhorted.
but the gray, broken, painful place you now find yourself
has no use for these things.
you've been vulnerable for far too long.
who in their right mind would willingly throw off the mantle of self-protection- 
the anger, bitterness, coldness, detached way you've come to live- 
and leap naively into  
love.

what is there to say to one who has done no wrong; 
yet been so hurt, so abused, and feels all of this and more?
only God can save us from this.

and if my heart should somehow stop

a nice find

 Extracts from a conversation

James Vincent McMorrow released his debut record, Early in the Morning, in Ireland to widespread critical acclaim in February 2010.

A stunning collection of songs recorded over 5 months in an isolated house by the sea, the album is a completely self recorded and played affair, filled with beguiling and vivid stories, fables that move from a whisper in your ear to a mountainous crescendo in the space of a song, all the while retaining the environment and sentiment in which they were formed.

“This record was borne out of my desire to create something singular, take the simplest of chords, wrap them in washes of melody, so lines come in, they drop out, everything ebbs and flows as the songs move towards their inevitable end. I don’t sit down with an agenda when I write, I usually have a first line, and a vague sense in my head of where I’m going, but no real solid structure. Music tends to reveal itself to me over the course of weeks and months. It’s probably quite like sculpting, you have a chisel, you know what’s waiting for you inside the stone, all that’s left is to chip away the pieces and reveal it.”

website

nana

The haunting melody of Nana, full of longing and melancholy but also hope in a certain way, was transformed into a Cello and Guitar version by Ana Ruth Bermúdez and Rene Izquierdo. The sound of the classical guitar, along with the vocal quality of Ana Ruth's cello, seem to be ideal for this masterpiece of Spanish music . . . . .

download this version 

knee-deep

For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists. . .  but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but who in way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after. And that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.

I believe that we know much more about God than we admit that we know. God speaks to us, I would say, much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize. Before the sun sets every evening, he speaks to each of us in an intensely personal and unmistakable way. His message is not written out in starlight, which in the long run would make no difference; rather, it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day; it is a message that in the long run might just make all the difference.

Who knows what he will say to me today or to you today or into the midst of what kind of unlikely moment he will choose to say it. Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery. But I believe that there are some things that by and large God is always saying to each of us. All of us, for instance, carry around inside ourselves, I believe, a certain emptiness- a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside our skin. Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd. 

Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God's voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we may know him best through our missing him.

 -from Message In The Stars,

 a sermon by Frederick Buechner

jennifer knapp.

the website

"thy thousand wanderings"

i opened my email today to find this wonderful passage sent from my sweet sister, thanks Lydia!

"O believer, learn to reject pride, seeing that thou hast no ground for it. Whatever thou art, thou hast nothing to make thee proud. The more thou hast, the more thou art in debt to God; and thou shouldst not be proud of that which renders thee a debtor. Consider thine origin; look back to what thou wast. Consider what thou wouldst have been but for divine grace. Look upon thyself as thou art now. Doth not thy conscience reproach thee? Do not thy thousand wanderings stand before thee, and tell thee that thou art unworthy to be called his son? And if he hath made thee anything, art thou not taught thereby that it is grace which hath made thee to differ? Great believer, thou wouldst have been a great sinner if God had not made thee to differ. O thou who art valiant for truth, thou wouldst have been as valiant for error if grace had not laid hold upon thee. Therefore, be not proud, though thou hast a large estate--a wide domain of grace, thou hadst not once a single thing to call thine own except thy sin and misery. Oh! strange infatuation, that thou, who hast borrowed everything, shouldst think of exalting thyself; a poor dependent pensioner upon the bounty of thy Saviour, one who hath a life which dies without fresh streams of life from Jesus, and yet proud! Fie on thee, O silly heart!"

from Charles Spurgeon's Daily Meditations,

found here

have you ever.....

..."coming home to you"

"chasing after laughter..."

"just remember"

chess.

"I have one simple response: give it up. If you don't think you're also playing chess against God, then prove it by letting go of the things that provide you with a sense of security, or comfort, or excitement, or relief. You will soon discover the tentacles of attachment deep in your soul. There will be an anxiousness; you will begin to think about work or food or golf even more. Withdrawal will set in. If you can make it a week or two out of sheer willpower, you will find a sadness growing in your soul, a deep sense of loss. Lethargy and a lack of motivation will follow. Remember, we will make an idol out of anything, especially a good thing. So distant are we now from Eden, we are desperate for life, and we come to believe that we must arrange for it as best we can, or no one will. God must thwart us to save us.

. . .we are still committed to arranging for life now. . . We don't even set our hope partially on the life to come. Not really, not in the desires of our hearts. Heaven may be coming. Great. But, it's a long way off and who really knows, so I'm getting what I can now.

. . .Many people were shattered by Brent's death. I know I was. Not even on my worst enemies would I wish such pain. But I also know this: the shattering was good. Living apart from God comes naturally; all the striving and arranging is so second-nature to me that to have it stopped in its tracks was a great good. I would wake in the morning in those early days of grief, and instead of my desires "rushing at me like a pack of wild animals" as Lewis said, I knew it can't be done. I knew it more personally than I had ever known it before. We must learn this lesson, at whatever cost, or the spell will not be broken and we will never discover true hope.

. . ."Remember how the LORD your God lead you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart . . .He humbled you, causing you to hunger" (Deuteronomy 8:2-3). During my "chess matches" with God, I often wrestled with his reasons for thwarting my dreams and desires. I am serving you faithfully, God. Why won't you let me have this little pleasure? It felt to me so unfair, even cruel.

. . .As I allowed myself to feel that quiet and long-buried desire, a sentence popped up out of my heart: I could really be happy here without God.

I haven't wanted to be an eternal person. I've wanted to find true life here somehow.

Pascal observed, "We are never living, but hoping to live; and whilst we are always preparing to be happy, it is certain, we never shall be so, if we aspire to no other happiness than what can be enjoyed in this life."

-The above passages are taken from the book Desire, by John Eldredge

.....''What I meant was a particular recurrent experience which dominated my childhood and adolescence and which I hastily called ‘Romantic’ because inanimate nature and marvelous literature were among the things that evoked it.  I still believe that the experience is common, commonly misunderstood, and of immense importance: but I know now that in other minds it arises under other stimuli and is entangled with other irrelevancies and that to bring it into the forefront of consciousness is not so easy as I once supposed.  I will now try to describe it sufficiently to make the following pages intelligible.

The experience is one of intense longing.  It is distinguished from other longings by two things.  In the first place, though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight.  Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future: hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat.  But this desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it.  This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth.  And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire, though the subject may not at once recognize the fact and thus cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated.  This sounds complicated, but it is simple when we live it.  ‘Oh to feel as I did then!’ we cry; not noticing that even while we say the words the very feeling whose loss we lament is rising again in all its old bitter-sweetness.  For this sweet Desire cuts across our ordinary distinctions between wanting and having.  To have it is, by definition, a want: to want it, we find, is to have it.

In the second place, there is a peculiar mystery about the object of this Desire.  Inexperienced people (and inattention leaves some inexperienced all their lives) suppose, when they feel it, that they know what they are desiring.  Thus if it comes to a child while he is looking at a far off hillside he at once thinks ‘if only I were there’; if it comes when he is remembering some event in the past, he thinks ‘if only I could go back to those days’.  If it comes (a little later) while he is reading a ‘romantic’ tale or poem of ‘perilous seas and faerie lands forlorn’, he thinks he is wishing that such places really existed and that he could reach them.  If it comes (later still) in a context with erotic suggestions he believes he is desiring the perfect beloved.  If he falls upon literature (like Maeterlinck or the early Yeats) which treats of spirits and the like with some show of serious belief, he may think that he is hankering for real magic and occultism.  When it darts out upon him form his studies in history or science, he may confuse it with the intellectual craving for knowledge.

But every one of these impressions is wrong.  The sole merit I claim for this book is that it is written by one who has proved them all to be wrong.  There is no room for vanity in the claim: I know them to be wrong not by intelligence buy by experience, such experience as would not have come my way if my youth had been wiser, more virtuous, and less self-centered than it was.  For I have myself been deluded by every one of these false answers in turn, and have contemplated each of them earnestly to discover the cheat.  To have embraced so many false Florimels is no matter for boasting: it is fools, they say, who learn by experience.  But since they do at least learn, let a fool bring his experience into the common stock that wiser men profit by it.

Every one of these supposed objects for the Desire is inadequate to it.  An easy experiment will show that by going to the far hillside you will get either nothing, or else a recurrence of the same desire which sent you thither.  A rather more difficult, but still possible, study of your own memories, will prove that by returning to the past you could not find, as a possession, that ecstasy which some sudden reminder of the past now moves you to desire.  Those remembered moments were either quite commonplace at the time (and owe all their enchantment to memory) or else were themselves moments of desiring.  The same is true of the things described in the poets and marvelous romancers.  The moment we endeavor to think out seriously what it would be like if they were actual, we discover this.  When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed to have photographed a fairy, I did not, in fact, believe it: but the mere making of the claim–the approach of the fairy to within even that hailing distance of actuality–revealed to me at once that if the claim had succeeded it would have chilled rather than satisfied the desire which fairy literature had hitherto aroused.  Once grant your fairy, your enchanted forest, your satyr, faun, wood-nymph and well of immortality real, and amidst all the scientific, social and practical interest which the discovery would awake, the Sweet Desire would have disappeared, would have shifted its ground, like the cuckoo’s voice or the rainbow’s end, and be now calling us beyond a  further hill.  With Magic in the darker sense (as it has been and is actually practiced) we should fare even worse.  How if one had gone that way–had actually called for something and it had come?  What would one feel? Terror, pride, guilt, tingling excitement … but what would all that have to do with our Sweet Desire? It is not at Black Mass or séance that the Blue Flower grows.  As for the sexual answer, that I suppose to be the most obvious Florimel of all.  On whatever plane you take it, it is not what we are looking for.  Lust can be gratified.  Another personality can become to us ‘our America, or our New-found-land’.  A happy marriage can be achieved.  But what has any of the three, or any mixture of the three, to do with the unnamable something, the desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves?

It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given–nay, cannot even be imagined as given–in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.  This Desire was, in the soul, as the Siege Perilous in Arthur’s castle–the chair in which only one could sit.  And if nature makes nothing in vain, the One who can sit on this chair must exist.  I knew only too well how easily the longing accepts false objects and through what dark ways the pursuit of them leads us: but I also saw that the Desire itself contains the corrective of all these errors.  The only fatal error was to pretend that you had passed from desire into fruition, when, in reality, you had found either nothing, or desire itself, or the satisfaction of some different desire.  The dialectic of Desire, faithfully followed, would retrieve all mistakes, head you off from all false paths, and force you not to propound, but to live through, a sort of ontological proof.  This lived dialectic, and the merely argued dialectic of my philosophical process, seemed to have converged on one goal; accordingly I tried to put them both into my allegory which thus became a defense of Romanticism (in my peculiar sense) as well as of Reason and Christianity.''
–C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress