Sunday, December 15, 2013

Diary

Buechner talks about the importance of recording the simple and mundane events of life.  I couldn't agree more, particularly because he doesn't feel the need to go on and on about the events.  Yesterday as I was driving in the snow and slop to get Benaiah at Drake, I was listening to "The Call" and one of the lines of a song was "death makes memories of us all"... indeed. -- DRS

Even the most cursory of diaries can be of incalculable value. What the weather was doing. Who we ran into on the street. The movie we saw. The small boy at the dentist's office. The dream.
Just a handful of the barest facts can be enough to rescue an entire day from oblivion—not just what happened in it, but who we were when it happened. Who the others were. What it felt like back then to be us.
"Our years come to an end like a sigh . . . " says Psalm 90, "so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom" (w. 9,12).
It is a mark of wisdom to realize how precious our days are, even the most uneventful of them. If we can keep them alive by only a line or so about each, at least we will know what we're sighing about when the last of them comes.
~ Originally published in Beyond Words

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Sundar Singh on the comprehension of God

I like Sundar Singh's thoughts... particularly how he gets that God is the source of even our desire to know Him....  Great thoughts this Advent season...  - DRS

Sadhu Sundar Singh:
All of us have a natural, inborn desire to see God. But God is infinite and incomprehensible. No one can see God without being of the same infinite nature as God. We are finite, and so we cannot see God. But God is love. He is also the source of our craving to know and love him.
Out of this love God took on a form that is comprehensible to us mortal beings. Through this act of love we can now share in the joy of the angels by seeing and knowing God directly. This is why Jesus said: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
God knows well your inner state – every person’s inner state – and reveals himself to each heart in accordance with its needs. There is no better way for a person to enter true spiritual life than by encountering God directly. God became man and dwelt among us so that we might not fear him as something terrible and foreign, but instead see that God is love.