Strangely I came across this quote in two different books today. It sounds like a famous one but I wasn't familiar with it so here it is:
Do all the good you can
By all the means you can
In all the ways you can
In all the places you can
At all the times you can
To all the people you can
As long as ever you can.
-- John Wesley
Making College Count by Derek Melleby p. 36 and Patches of Godlight by Jan Karon
Make College Count and Patches of Godlight
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
Friendship and a crazy "coincidence?"
So on Wednesday the 22nd I got up and read my Business of Heaven devotion which included the following quote: "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create)." I had been having some problems with my car that my local mechanic wasn't able to fix so I went online looking for Honda repair shop ratings. In the comments section for Mike's Automobile Repair shop was a very positive review, the shop responded with the above quote. It was an unbelievable coincidence as this isn't exactly one of Lewis' more well known quotes and was posted a few months ago. Needless to say I had to give them a call. They had openings and yesterday I took a 40 mile trip and got my car fixed. Friendship may be unnecessary, but a well running car is kind of a necessity.
-- Thanks Brandon, Mike and other technician guy, yesterday was a really good day. -- drs
-- Thanks Brandon, Mike and other technician guy, yesterday was a really good day. -- drs
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Placarding Christ Crucified
But his preaching of the cross,... is a stumbling block to human pride, for it insists that we cannot achieve our salvation by anything we do. Indeed, we cannot even contribute to it. Salvation is a totally noncontributory gift of God. As Archbishop William Temple put it, "The only thing of my very own which I contribute to my redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed."
Through the Bible: Through the Year; p. 349
Through the Bible: Through the Year; p. 349
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Something Dimly Seen
This one goes out to my mother-in-law MariLu who I know is a person who would appreciate this particular experience related by Buechner. -- drs
I remember a spring or so walking with a friend through a stand of maple trees at sugaring time. The sap buckets were hung from the trees, and if you were quiet, you could hear the sap dripping into them: all through the woods, if you kept still, you could hear the hushed drip-droppings of the sap into a thousand buckets or more hung out in the early spring woods with the sun coming down in long shafts through the trees. The sap of a maple is like rainwater, very soft, and almost without taste except for the faintest tinge of sweetness to it, and when my friend said he'd never tried it, I offered to give him a taste. I had to unhook the bucket from the tap to hold it for him, and when he bent his head to drink from it, I tipped the bucket down to his lips, and just as he was about to take a sip, he looked up at me and said, "I have a feeling you ought to be saying some words."
Well, my friend is no more or less religious than the next person, and we'd been chattering on about nothing in particular as we walked along until just at that moment as I tipped the bucket to his lips, he said what he said, and said it partly as a joke. He had a feeling I should be saying some words, he said, as I tipped the bucket to his lips so he could taste for the first time the taste of the lifeblood of a tree. And of course for a moment those unsaid words fell through the air of those woods like the shafts of sun, and it was no joke because the whole place became another place or became more deeply the place it truly was; and he and I became different, something happened for a second to the air around us and between us. It was not much and lasted only for a moment before it was gone. Bit it happened -- this glimpse of something dimly seen, dimly heard, this sense of something deeply hidden.
Listening to Your Life; June 21, p-. 163-4
I remember a spring or so walking with a friend through a stand of maple trees at sugaring time. The sap buckets were hung from the trees, and if you were quiet, you could hear the sap dripping into them: all through the woods, if you kept still, you could hear the hushed drip-droppings of the sap into a thousand buckets or more hung out in the early spring woods with the sun coming down in long shafts through the trees. The sap of a maple is like rainwater, very soft, and almost without taste except for the faintest tinge of sweetness to it, and when my friend said he'd never tried it, I offered to give him a taste. I had to unhook the bucket from the tap to hold it for him, and when he bent his head to drink from it, I tipped the bucket down to his lips, and just as he was about to take a sip, he looked up at me and said, "I have a feeling you ought to be saying some words."
Well, my friend is no more or less religious than the next person, and we'd been chattering on about nothing in particular as we walked along until just at that moment as I tipped the bucket to his lips, he said what he said, and said it partly as a joke. He had a feeling I should be saying some words, he said, as I tipped the bucket to his lips so he could taste for the first time the taste of the lifeblood of a tree. And of course for a moment those unsaid words fell through the air of those woods like the shafts of sun, and it was no joke because the whole place became another place or became more deeply the place it truly was; and he and I became different, something happened for a second to the air around us and between us. It was not much and lasted only for a moment before it was gone. Bit it happened -- this glimpse of something dimly seen, dimly heard, this sense of something deeply hidden.
Listening to Your Life; June 21, p-. 163-4
The Fruit of the Spirit
We need to cultivate the things of the Spirit by our wise use of Sundays, our daily disciplined private devotion, our regular public worship and attendance at the Lord's Supper, and our involvement in Christian service. For these are God-given means of grace, that is, channels through which God's grace comes to us, and a major secret of sanctification.
Through the Bible:Through the Year; p.348
Through the Bible:Through the Year; p.348
Thursday, June 16, 2011
The Especial Glory of Affection
Affection ... can 'rub along' with the most unpromising people. Yet oddly enough this very fact means that it can in the end make appreciations possible which, but for it, might never have existed. We may say, and not quite untruly, that we have chosen our friends and the woman we love for their various excellences -- for beauty, frankness, goodness of heart, wit, intelligence, or what not. but it had to be the particular kind of wit, the particular kind of beauty, the particular kind of goodness that we like, and we have our personal tastes in these matters. That is why friends and lovers feel that they were 'made for one another'. ...
Growing fond of 'old so-and-so', at first simply because he happens to be there, I presently begin to see that there is 'something in him' after all. The moment when one first says, really meaning it, that though he is not 'my sort of man' he is a very good man 'in his own way' is one of liberation. It does not feel like that; we may feel only tolerant and indulgent. But really we have crossed a frontier. The 'in his own way' means that we are getting beyond our own idiosyncrasies, that we are learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence flavoured and served to suit our own palate.
The Business of Heaven; June 15, pp. 154-5
Growing fond of 'old so-and-so', at first simply because he happens to be there, I presently begin to see that there is 'something in him' after all. The moment when one first says, really meaning it, that though he is not 'my sort of man' he is a very good man 'in his own way' is one of liberation. It does not feel like that; we may feel only tolerant and indulgent. But really we have crossed a frontier. The 'in his own way' means that we are getting beyond our own idiosyncrasies, that we are learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence flavoured and served to suit our own palate.
The Business of Heaven; June 15, pp. 154-5
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
The Bible Without Tears
Buechner gives some excellent thoughts about how to read the Bible in today's reading. He gives 7 really good ideas, but I'm only going to share numbers 6 and 7... hey, you really should be getting a copy of this book anyway. --- drs
6. If somebody claims that you have to take the Bible literally, word for word, or not at all, ask him if you have to take John the Baptist literally when he calls Jesus the Lamb of God.
If somebody claims that no rational person can take a book seriously which assumes that the world was created in six days and man in an afternoon, ask him if he can take Shakespeare seriously whose scientific knowledge would have sent a third-grader into peals of laughter.
7. Finally this. If you look at a window, you see fly-specks, dust, the crack where Juniors Frisbee hit it. If you look through a window, you see the world beyond.
Something like this is the difference between those who see the Bible as a Holy Bore and those who see it as the Word of God which speaks out of the depths of an almost unimaginable past into the depths of ourselves.
Listening to Your Life; June 14, p.159
6. If somebody claims that you have to take the Bible literally, word for word, or not at all, ask him if you have to take John the Baptist literally when he calls Jesus the Lamb of God.
If somebody claims that no rational person can take a book seriously which assumes that the world was created in six days and man in an afternoon, ask him if he can take Shakespeare seriously whose scientific knowledge would have sent a third-grader into peals of laughter.
7. Finally this. If you look at a window, you see fly-specks, dust, the crack where Juniors Frisbee hit it. If you look through a window, you see the world beyond.
Something like this is the difference between those who see the Bible as a Holy Bore and those who see it as the Word of God which speaks out of the depths of an almost unimaginable past into the depths of ourselves.
Listening to Your Life; June 14, p.159
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