grace, sufficient and extravagant

As I climbed into bed last night, I was distracted by the view out my window and a thought.

I love this place.



It got me out of bed early the other day, too, because I woke up and the sky was so gloriously beautiful.  It fits right in with the over-joyed theme of this summer.  


This summer makes for a second full rotation of seasons that I've had in Bloomington, living in the same apartment in the same town.  It has been so very, very good. 


There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life.
Every one of them sufficient.
~Marylynne Robinson


We're so lucky we're still alive to see this beautiful world.
Look at the sky.
It's not dark and black and without character.
The black is in fact deep blue.
And over there!  Lighter blue.
And blowing through the blueness and the blackness,
the winds swirling through the air.
And there, shining, burning, bursting through,
the stars!
Can you see how they roll their light?
Everywhere we look, 
complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.
~Dr. Who


Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible.
Love always takes time,
and time is the one thing hurried people don't have.
~John Ortberg


You should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes.
~John Mayer


It's times like these you learn to live again
It's times like these you give and give again
It's times like these you learn to love again
It's times like these time and time again
~Foo Fighters


You say grace before meals.
All right.
But I say grace before the concert & the opera,
& grace before the play & pantomime,
& grace before I open a book,
& grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing
& grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
~G. K. Chesterton

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Waiting in the Rain (and Loving the Weather)

Image
Photo by Hannah Domsic on Unsplash I'm not a very serious gardener as of yet, but moving into an actual house this past spring opened up some possibilities for me to invest a little more in dreaming about growing things and cultivating our outdoor space as we do with the indoor.  Between wedding gifts and a church full of avid and generous gardeners, we soon found ourselves well equipped with a variety of containers, happily started plants, and abundant advice.  I set up a row of containers along one side of our yard and we got to enjoy some cucumbers, a few cherry tomatoes, quite a few peppers, and fresh herbs in everything .   My dreams for next year involved rototilling up one side of the yard (conveniently partitioned off by the sidewalk.) We broke down cardboard boxes for a month or two and now have that space pretty well covered with a layer of cardboard weighted down with a motley assortment of heavy junk -- pots, Adirondack chairs, an old shelf that's destined for the
Read more

Not in Vain

Image
Recently I've been listening a lot to Your Labor is Not in Vain (lyrics here ) , and yesterday I realized that I love this song not only for the reminder that it is to me, but because it makes me think of friends, dear brothers and sisters all over the world, and how faithfully they labor, and what a joy it is to be co-laborers. As many of us celebrate Thanksgiving this week, I hope that you all know how much I'm encouraged by the work that you do.  I see a fraction of what makes up your lives -- teaching, parenting, dealing with medical needs, listening to the people around you, fighting for justice for those who can't speak for themselves, making art, making meals, writing books, being willing to travel across the world, being willing to stay in the same hard place. I need to be reminded frequently that the work here is not in vain, that my students are learning how to be better thinkers and growing in their confidence to communicate in English, that conversati
Read more

When Evening is Overwhelming

Image
I was angry the other night. Enraged.  Furious.  Indignant.  Infuriated. I felt that there were not synonyms enough in the English language to express the depths of my emotion.  The world is sometimes so desperately broken and evil blows itself up so large, casting such large and far-reaching shadows that words fall short. There are no curses I know strong enough for such evil , I thought. Except one. Resurrection . In the face of the most ravaging evil that tightens around the world, that creates fissures in cultures, that breaks the hearts of my students, there is hope. He's risen. That truth is what kicks evil in the teeth, the earthquake that will destroy the whole kingdom of darkness.  For now, we wait and work, living in age of aftershocks, knowing that light is coming, that full morning will dawn and push out the darkness forever. ~~~ ["When Evening is Overwhelming" taken from a song by Zach Winters .]
Read more