Best read while listing to The Man Comes Around.
I told some people this week that my wife was pretty sick and in no time our community was bringing us meals and offered to do literally everything that we would possibly need to leave the house for. We're getting care packages left on our doorstep every day. We are so moved by the generosity and love shown to us.
We found out yesterday that Liv has…
The contrast of these two statements from Biden and Pence is really something to behold. I was particularly struck by this incredibly blasphemous statement, but it is the view of many of my Christian friends and family, which causes me great shame and embarrassment:
The American people know that the foundation of America is freedom, but the foundation of freedom is faith. Our freedoms are a gift from our Creator, and when we defend them, we make His work on earth our own.
– Mike Pence
…
Tish Harrison Warren:
The root of religious freedom amid pluralism is love for our neighbors, especially our ideological or political enemies. We cannot spend eight years supporting a president whose basic modus operandi is meanness and cruelty-- who vocally disagrees with the call to love one’s enemy--and then expect anyone to take us seriously when we ask them to respect our religious freedom.
…
I'm catching up this week after a tussle with some poison ivy. Nature's ever-ready reminder that it is more than we.
Really enjoying the Atlantic lately. Peter Wehner:
The conservative evangelical David French has reminded us that in 1998, during the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a “Resolution on Moral…
Retired doctor and author Lodovico Balducci:
I grew up in a small town in Italy where abortion was illegal and could bring criminal charges. Yet in my hometown, everyone knew where to go for an abortion. There was a provider for poor women and a provider for the well-to-do. Most of the time, authorities in this mostly Catholic country left both alone.
[...]
I’m…
grieve](https://annehelen.substack.com/p/so-much-time-and-none-it-to-grieve)
A beautiful article by Anne Helen Petersen:
Whatever grief you are feeling, whether related to COVID or otherwise, whether anticipatory or existential, whether related to your own health or the world’s or your community’s — it matters. It doesn’t matter more, but it matters. And that means we…
Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age- it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For everyone strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realisation he ends…
We have to receive the revelation that He is here. The reception of the Holy Spirit is the maintained attitude of a believer. When we receive the Holy Spirit, we receive quickening life from the ascended Lord.
It is not the baptism of the Holy Ghost which changes men, but the power of the ascended Christ coming into men's lives by the Holy Ghost that changes them. We too often divorce what the…
Hallelujah, I’m caving in
Hallelujah, I’m in love again
Hallelujah, I’m a wretched man
Hallelujah, every breath is a second chance
– Jon Foreman
This is the common expectation in our world: Hide your weaknesses, highlight your strengths. Appear strong, even if you’re not.
[…]
Honesty about our weakness is healthy. There is great relief in throwing off the burden of hiding who we really are to earn love and respect.
– Matt Thomas, Strength in Weakness
We must remember that if the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is at the core of our theology, we are on the same team.
– Matt Thomas
As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Come now, solemnest feast on the road to eternal freedom,
Death, and destroy those fetters that bow, those walls that imprison
this our transient life, these souls that linger in darkness,
so that at last we see what is here withheld from our vision.
Long did we seek you, freedom, in discipline, action and suffering.
Now that we die, in the face of God himself we behold you.
– An excerpt from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's poem, …
Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a Squire from his country house.Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.Am I then really that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat,
yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness,
tossing in expectation of great events,
…
My rest is a weapon against the oppression of man's obsession to control things.
– Josh Garrells, The Resistance
It has always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
— John Steinbeck, …
I’ve been mulling over these thoughts a lot in the past few weeks. I decided I should just write something down before I lose my own train of thought to time. I want so badly to remember this.
Fear is a monstrous thing. It is full of darkness and gives birth to more fear. I’ve seen it take many forms, but for me, it mostly surfaces as something like anxiety. I get lost in thought more easily than…
Take courage sons, for we must go under the heart of darkness and set them free. But don’t lose heart when you see the numbers; There’s no measure for the faith we bring. It’s given us to overcome. If we run where the spirit calls us on, The greatest things have yet to come. With the dawn we will rise.
Though they may surround me like lions, and crush me on all sides, I may fall, but I will rise…
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Your idea is very precious
Within the public square, we have created the same chilling effect upon those who would speak of God or sin or self-control or moral absolutes. We have created a mindset that every person is free to determine their own truth, their own right or wrong, yet we are shocked when someone actually plays that out in reality.
– Del Tackett, [Responding to Obama's Call for Action](http://deltackett.com/index.php?option=comk2&view=item&id=353:responding-to-obama’s-call-for…
Things that are easy to use survive, regardless of what is fashionable, and people want to use them forever.
– Sori Yanagi
I’ve been reading this on our Ireland trip. An awesome compilation - I’m always amazed at how complex a subject he could fit in so few words.
Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands.
– I Thessalonians 1:11
On Father’s Day, many only say, “My dad taught me to work hard”. I think working hard is nothing on its own. I’m grateful that my father also taught me to work well, and not just to be a working man, but to be a gentleman – to save time for love.
I love you, dad.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is…
Nick Offerman. A manly man, not just in character, but reality. He operates his own Offerman Woodshop. I’d like to meet him.
Olivia started learning how to create latte art today at The Hub. These are pictures, in order, of all of her attempts. If you were thinking, “pretty amazing,” you were right.
Andrew, if I should not see you again, I wish you to remember and treasure up some things I have already said to you: in this world you will have to make your own way. To do that you must have friends. You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you. To…
Two weeks ago I ordered a hard drive from Amazon. I’m still amazed by the fact that you can track packages around the world, so I know that it arrived on a Thursday evening or Friday morning (since I’m into that sort of thing).
Our apartment complex has no one to work at our location, so there’s barely ever anyone in the office here. Though, it just so happens that someone was here when my package…
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
– Steve Jobs
Yes, humanity’s song is the absurd, the tragic, the comic; the profane and the beautiful; the fallen and the redeemed. Our society is fraught with inconsistencies and absurdities. We claim to believe that all of humankind is created equal in a country torn apart by racial tension. We deem killing to be punishable by death but honorable under the title of war. We claim to serve a God who loves the…
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
– Steve Jobs
Had he had more wisdom of the serpent… he would perhaps have known that to try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse; that the only way to make them good is to be good - remembering well the beam and the moat; that the time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs.
– George MacDonald
Do you think the work God gives us to do is never easy? Jesus says His yoke is easy, His burden is light. People sometimes refuse to do God’s work just because it is easy. This is sometimes because they cannot believe that easy work is His work; but there may be a very bad pride in it… Some, again, accept it with half a heart and do it with half a hand. But however easy any work may be, it cannot…
Two things happened today that made me laugh hard, so I want the whole world to know them.
First.
Livi and I picked up bagels from Panera to eat for breakfast. It’s hard to drive stick and eat a cream cheese filled cinnamon crunch bagel, so at one point I had Livi do the shifting so I could have an extra hand. I know, dangerous, right? Well comforting or not, we’re actually pretty stellar at doing…
Stranger: Hi.
Me: Hi.
Stranger: You wanna plank?
Me: No.
Stranger: It's where you… Well, if you don't know…
Me: No, I know.
Stranger: Oh, so do you want to?
Me: Still no.
For those of you that don't know, this is planking. Kind of a weird thing to do in the middle of National and Battlefield.
Every one of us is something that the other is not, and therefore knows something - it may be without knowing that he knows it - which no one else knows: and … it is everyone’s business, as one of the kingdom of light and inheritor in it all, to give his portion to the rest.
– George MacDonald
The truth of the flower is, not the facts about it, be they correct as ideal science itself, but the shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk - the compeller of smile and tear…The idea of God is the flower: His idea is not the botany of the flower. Its botany is but a thing of ways and means - of canvas and color and brush in relation to the picture in the painter’s brain.
…
He gave men the power to thwart His will, that, by means of that same power, he might come at last to do His will in a higher kind and way than would otherwise have been possible to him.
– George MacDonald
The truth of the flower is, not the facts about it, be they correct as ideal science itself, but the shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk-the compeller of smile and tear…The idea of God is the flower: His idea is not the botany of the flower. Its botany is but a thing of ways and means-of canvas and color and brush in relation to the picture in the painter’s brain.
…
So, it’s getting pretty close to the day where I’m getting married. I’ve been thinking about how when such a huge event is coming up in your life you tend to start thinking about only that and life after that ‘big day’ seems to not even exist.
We sort of hype things like weddings up a bit too much for my taste, it’s a little unrealistic. I’m not meaning at all that I’m not excited for my wedding, it’s going to be fantastic. But what really excites me is the life after the party. The wedding is only the beginning - It’s just one day, just a tiny blip on the radar of time. What really excites me is life…
This is Olivia’s wedding planning notebook. She made custom tabs out of tape and her glyphs are so stinkin’ cool. I like her.
My beautiful fiancé.. And our first dining room chair
Our invites, designed by @skyhartman
1986 - My parents wedding day. A rabble of monarch butterflies decided to migrate through Hastings on the morning of their celebration.
