desire

"what a man desires is unfailing love" Proverbs 19:22

worried

Today worrying means to be occupied and preoccupied with many things, while at the same time being bored, resentful, depressed, and very lonely. I am not trying to say that all of us are worried in such an extreme way all the time. Yet, there is little doubt in my mind that the experience of bring filled yet unfulfilled touches most of us to some degree at some time. In our highly technological and competitive world, it is hard to avoid completely the forces which fill up our inner and outer space and disconnect us from our innermost selves, our fellow human beings, and our God.

One of the most notable characteristics of worrying is that it fragments our lives. The many things to do, to think about, to plan for, the many people to remember, to visit, or to talk with, the many causes to attack or defend, all those pull us apart and make us lose our center. Worrying causes us to be "all over the place," but seldom at home. One way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there. We know where we belong, but we keep being pulled away in many directions, as if we were still homeless. "All these other things" keep demanding our attention. They lead us so far from home that we eventually forget our true address, that is, the place where we can be addressed.

Jesus responds to this condition of being filled yet unfulfilled, very busy yet unconnected, all over the place yet never at home. He wants to bring us to the place where we can belong. But his call to live a spiritual life can only be heard when we are willing honestly to confess our own homeless and worrying existence and recognize its fragmenting effect on our daily life. Only then can a desire for our true home develop. It is of this desire that Jesus speaks when he says, "Do not worry.... Set your hearts on his kingdom first... and all these other things will be given you as well."

by Henri Nouwen

memories

I too often remember what I should forget and forget what I should remember

give

if I don't give regularly, if I don't let go, then I will begin to believe that something is mine.

free

"He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye. He allows us to neglect what He would have us do, or to fail. Perhaps we do not fully realize the problem, so to call it, of enabling finite free will to co-exist with Omnipotence. It seems to involve at every moment almost a sort of divine abdication. We are not mere recipients or spectators. We are either privilaged to share in the game or compelled to collaborate in the work, 'to weild our little tridents'." -C.S. Lewis

roots

"Perhaps in the soul, as in the soil, those growths that show the brightest colours and put forth the most overpowering smell have not always the deepest root." -C.S. Lewis

thank you

my thoughts have been dominated by an overwhelming thankfulness for all that I have had and lost

for all that I have had and lost, I am thankful

seriously

"We are so nauseatingly serious, so desperately interested in our own character and reputation, we refuse to behave like Christians in the shallow concerns of life. Make a determination to take no one seriously except God. You may find that the first person you must be the most critical with, as being the greatest fraud you have ever known, is yourself." -Oswald Chambers

good

"It seems we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On every level of our life - in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience - we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we're still looking for the old one." -C.S. Lewis

quiet

"The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save, He will take great delight in you, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing." Zephaniah 3:17

love

"But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him." -C.S. Lewis

rabbits

"Has anyone else chased a rabbit off the trail, realized it wasn't easy finding your way back and wished you would have stayed put in the first place?" -Jennifer Waltman

a mystery

"Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of things have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies. We cover our deep ignorance with words, but we are ashamed to wonder, we are afraid to whisper 'mystery.'" A.W. Tozer

"As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things" Ecclesiastes 11:5

the limelight

"We have a tendency to look for wonder in our experience, and we mistake heroic actions for real heroes. It’s one thing to go through a crisis grandly, yet quite another to go through every day glorifying God when there is no witness, no limelight, and no one paying even the remotest attention to us." -Oswald Chambers

on prayer

"there are, no doubt, passages in the New Testament which may seem at first sight to promise an invariable granting of our prayers. But that cannot be what they really mean. For in the very heart of the story we meet a glaring instance to the contrary. In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not. After that the idea that prayer is recommended to us as a sort of infallible gimmick may be dismissed." -C.S. Lewis

Screwtape speaks again...

"you mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realise that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that 'suits' him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches." -C.S. Lewis

a word from Screwtape

"the humans live in time, but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity." -C.S. Lewis

memory

"We might be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us." -Jimmy Gator, Magnolia

to keep

"love can be kept only by being given away" -Thomas Merton

the fellowship of sharing in sufferings

"I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead." Philippians 3:10,11

great man

"there is something great about man, and we have lost perhaps our greatest opportunity of evangelism in our generation by not insisting that it is the Bible that explains why man is great." -Francis Schaeffer

my thoughts, as they pertain to "touch"

we're so blinded by our flesh and blood, we take what we can feel, touch

it always lets us down, and we wonder why we haven't found what we need, but we aren't looking for it

and we are not open to it

that takes such a great... ...to know ourselves

I've been told by The Great God to not have a spirit of fear and yet so often fear prevents the "soul meets body"

I am afraid to know who I am, I like the idea of who I have created, who I think you know I am

I don't want to know that I am less, and won't believe that I can be more

I wish to know the law by grace

to feel my flesh with spirit

that my dead body would meet my eternal soul

and then, I can meet someone for the very first time

then I can love them in their presence and in their absence

to meditate

"...to meditate is to read a text and to learn it 'by heart' in the fullest sense of this expression, that is, with one's whole being: with the body since the mouth pronounced it, with the memory which fixes it, with the intelligence which understands its meaning and with the will which desires to put it in practice." -Jean Leclercq

touch

"...many of our disappointments and frustrations in life are related to the fact that seeing and touching each other does not always create the closeness we seek." -Henri Nouwen

a mirage

"What happens to [the Saved] is best described as the opposite of a mirage. What seemed, when they entered it, to be the vale of misery turns out, when they look back, to have been a well; and where present experience saw only salt deserts memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water." -C.S. Lewis

to neighbor

"God wants all of our heart, all of our mind, and all of our soul. It is this unconditional and unreserved love for God that leads to the care for our neighbor, not as an activity which distracts us from God or competes with our attention to God, but as an expression of our love for God who reveals himself to us as the God of all people. It is in God that we find our neighbors and discover our responsibility to them. We might even say that only in God does our neighbor become a neighbor rather than an infringement upon our autonomy, and that only in and through God does service become possible." -Henri Nouwen

lost & found

"no one can be found unless they are lost" -John Fischer

no care

"Anxiety is not only a pain which we must ask God to assuage but also a weakness we must ask Him to pardon- for He's told us take no care for the morrow." -C.S. Lewis

truth

"The delight which the mariner feels, when, after having been tossed about for many a day, he steps again upon the solid shore, is the satisfaction of a Christian when, amidst all the changes of this troublous life, he rests the foot of his faith upon this truth—'I am the Lord, I change not.'" -C.H. Spurgeon

trust

"it takes an initial respect for privacy before anything can be exposed." -John Fischer