That's What HE Said

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.” (Steve Jobs)

• "Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him." (God, Hebrews 9)

Lunatic Fringe

It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination.  Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy.  If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.  In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade.  The whole creation is one lunatic fringe.  If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that.  No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Read beyond your borders

Reading has given me fluency in the language of sorrow, the grammar of grace, experiences that unite us across borders and time zones.

Marita Golden, The Word

I believe that it's the duty of of every truly free citizen to read, especially to read beyond your borders.

Edwidge Danticat

In the beginning was the Word

"If you open up scripture, the Gospel according to John starts: "In the beginning was the Word." Although this has a very particular meaning in Scripture, more broadly what it speaks to is the critical importance of language, of writing, of reading, of communication, of books as a means of transmitting culture and binding us together as a people "

- Barack Obama, then US senator from Illinois speaking before the annual conference of the American Library Association, July 23, 2005

copied from The Word, edited by Marita Golden, Broadway Paperbacks, 2012

Seeing

"I've been thinking about seeing.  There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises.  The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.  But - and this is the point - who gets excited by a mere penny?  If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go on your rueful way?  It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny.  But if you cultivate a a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.  It is that simple.  What you see is what you get."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The World is a Classroom that Teaches us about God

♦ God is No Drunkard; or What's With Psalm 78? (The Gospel Coalition)

Third, we should see the world as a classroom that teaches us about God. He is the author of all creation, which reflects upon him. God the Father is reflected in the way a father loves and instructs his children. Husbands mirror the kind of relationship Christ has with the church. When mothers rejoice over their babies with singing, or wives remain faithful to their unfaithful husband, they reflect God.

Fourth, Scripture can use images and actions that by themselves are perceived negatively, even sinfully, to give meaning. . .

Word on the Tweet

"Some of us need a sighting of the occupied throne of heaven right about now". (@scottywardsmith)

"Goodwin: "The gospel contains two depths in it, one to fill your understanding, the other to fill your will and affections forever.". (@tonyreinke)

"God’s silences are actually His answers. bit.ly/mu1011 " (@oschambers)

Surprised by the Seasons

Autumn on the Seine, by Monet

"I wonder how long it would take you to notice the regular recurrence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth.  What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and nights?  you could say. "it's cold again; it was cold before," but you couldn't make the key connection and say, "it was cold this time last year," because the notion of "year" is precisely the one you lack.  Assuming you hadn't yet noticed any orderly progression of heavenly bodies, how long would you have to live on earth before you could feel any assurance that one one long particular long period of cold would, in fact, end?  "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease":  God makes this guarantee very early in Genesis to a people whose fears on this point had perhaps not been completely allayed."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Do God's Will

"The goal of the missionary is to do God’s will, not to be useful or to win the lost. A missionary is useful and he does win the lost, but that is not his goal. His goal is to do the will of his Lord."

Oswald Chambers (utmost.org)