all of it flowing towards You

My life has been one long secret,
All of it flowing towards you:
Lost hopes, hidden love, everything
A way to whisper in your ear.
Whatever else you are,
You are also the coolness of that dust
Which lies quietly under the long shadows
Of my small hedge.

[Rabindranath Tagore]

Unwritten Cultural Laws of a Kindergarten Classroom

1. Everything is a state of emergency. Everything.

2. If your daily helper responsibility is door opener or line leader, do all that you can to fulfill your duties, including pushing and hitting others so that they do not try to usurp your responsibility.

3. Narrate your life to your teacher. It’s a well-known fact that teachers want — nay, need -- to be informed of your every action at all times. Once you complete a task, such as putting the purple crayon back into your box, you must notify the teacher.

4. Your teacher is the final arbiter in any dispute within the classroom. If you know the jumbo-sized pencil is yours and your best friend who found it doesn’t know, tell your teacher first before you let your best friend know that it’s yours.

5. To avoid bladder infections, go to the bathroom at least ten times a day.

6. If your pencil is sharpened, it probably needs to be sharpened.

7. If your best friend’s pencil is sharpened, your pencil probably needs to be sharpened.

8. Screaming burns calories, and our teachers want us to be healthy.

9. If you see any grown-up in your school that even looks remotely like a teacher (key characteristics including but not limited to female, black pants, frenetic gait), you have the right to hug that person.

10. Your teacher needs to know that you love her. Hug her at least 20 times a day. If you haven’t met your quota for hugs and you remember you need to give her hugs, do so immediately. Your teacher won’t mind if it’s in the middle of the math lesson or during story time.

the secret is Christ in me

"The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances."

[Elisabeth Elliot]

furnace of doubt

"It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

dearly beloved, we gather together

be still

less about our lamentable inability to be heard than our inherent flawed condition

"Just One God" by Deborah Cummins

And so many of us.
How can we expect Him
to keep track of which voice
goes with what request.
Words work their way skyward.
Oh Lord, followed by petition —
for a cure, the safe landing.
For what is lost, missing —
a spouse, a job, the final game.
Complaint cloaked as need —
the faster car, porcelain teeth.
That so many entreaties
go unanswered
may say less about our lamentable
inability to be heard
than our inherent flawed condition.

Why else, at birth, the first sound
we make, that full-throttled cry?
Of want, want, want.
Of never enough. Desire
as embedded in us as the ancestral tug
in my unconscienced dog who takes
to the woods, nose to the ground, pulled far
from domesticated hearth, bowl of kibble.
Left behind, I go about my superior business,
my daily ritual I could call prayer.

But look, this morning, in my kitchen,
I’m not asking for more of anything.
My husband slices bread,
hums a tune from our past.
Eggs spatter in a skillet.
Wands of lilac I stuck in a glass
by the open window wobble
in a radiant and — dare I say it?—
merciful light.

the ear of sovereign grace attends the mourner's prayer

Hast Thou not bid me seek Thy face, 

And shall I seek in vain?
And can the ear of sovereign grace,
Be deaf when I complain?
No still the ear of sovereign grace,
Attends the mourner's prayer
Oh may I ever find access,
To breathe my sorrows there

Thy mercy seat is open still,
Here let my soul retreat
With humble hope attend Thy will,
And wait beneath Thy feet...

[Anne Steele]

metaphysical intuitions

"Welch takes from her mountain and Southern sources a set of metaphysical intuitions. We are not made for satisfaction. To be a person is often to feel exiled, alone, and predestined. These axioms of Appalachian Protestantism, which you can hear in songs like the Stanley Brothers’ 'Rank Stranger,' are the fixations of Welch’s 'The Harrow & The Harvest' (2011), her fourth and most recent album, whose master theme is fatalism. 'The way that it goes,' 'the way that it ends,' and 'the way it will be' are some of the refrains, and the music feels like being caught in a slow-moving but irresistible force, maybe just the temperamental force of what Welch calls being 'blessed with a dark turn of mind.' The predestination here is to perennially reckon with unruly and obdurate feeling: people cannot help what moves them, what makes them feel alive. Morphine, 'soldier’s joy,' and heroin pop up frequently in Welch’s songwriting, and, like other motifs, feel as much symbolic as literal. The sense of fate in her mature songwriting resembles the feeling of addiction: a blurred line between desires and needs, pleasure and enervation, what feeds you and what consumes you."
 

[from Jedediah Purdy's "Twenty Years of Listening to Gillian Welch"]

laying hold of His willingness

Signal Point

I love this city.

return, o my soul, to your rest

Gracious is the Lord, and righteous;
our God is merciful.
The Lord preserves the simple;
when I was brought low, he saved me.

Return, O my soul, to your rest;
for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.

For you have delivered my soul from death,
my eyes from tears,
my feet from stumbling;
I will walk before the Lord
in the land of the living.

I believed, even when I spoke:
“I am greatly afflicted”;
I said in my alarm,
“All mankind are liars.”

What shall I render to the Lord
for all his benefits to me?

I will lift up the cup of salvation
and call on the name of the Lord,
I will pay my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people.

[Psalm 116]

what's beneath the surface of the life we have built

"Most of us don’t have much time in the margins to reflect on what we are feeling or how we are acting out of those feelings and values. Often it takes painful life-disruption before we stop and reflect on what’s beneath the surface of the life we have built. We live with patterns of behavior and relate to others without being awake to our real fears or woundedness." - Sandra McCracken

[from "Sandra McCracken on Life, Loss, and Longing in the Psalms"]

Fruit the point

"Roots are essential but not the point of a tree. Fruit is. Or shade. Or lumber. Or fall gold. So with man. Roots essential. Fruit the point." - John Piper

better is the end of a thing

"Better is the end of a thing than its beginning,
and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit."

[Ecclesiastes 7:8]

Love expensively.

Love expensively.

Meditation revelation: love and pride

The opposite of pride is love.

the more room is there for my Master

"The more empty I am, the more room is there for my Master. The more I lack, the more He will give me." (C.H. Spurgeon)

Sam Beam & Jesca Hoop: Tiny Desk Concert

Utterly beautiful.