Spending Time
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
- Annie Dillard
Stuck in Second Gear
As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way.
- Jack Handey
Moments of Grace
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
-Frederick Buechner
All shall be well
All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things will be made well.
- Julian of Norwich
Secret History
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Fiddle
Now, although a fiddle may never be fooled by the folly of human thinking, very much like us, they have pain. Their necks are stiff and their nerves, their strings, are stretched. They feel the friction of the bow, and inside their beautiful brown little bodies they have only a little stick called a sound-post and an emptiness that seizes every inch of space – top to bottom, side to side. Their emptiness is for them (as it is for us) a nearly unbearable ache – an ache that is fitted to the shape that makes its tone. And sometimes a fiddle is tempted to fill that void with rags or glass or gold, even knowing that, if it should do that, it would never resonate the intentions of its fiddler. It would never again be alive with his music. It would dull itself to the exquisite heat of the fiddler’s will, the deliberate tenderness of his fingers.
And so, they resist. They resist so that they can respond.
Some fiddles have lived without eyes or ears or innards for a couple hundred years. They would die, though, if they were denied a fiddler.
- Rich Mullins, The World As I Remember It: Through the Eyes of a Ragamuffin
Making good on your promise
(The Christian) does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
- C.S. Lewis
Running with broken legs
To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness – especially in the wilderness – you shall love him.
- Frederick Buechner
A Candlelight in Central Park
By the time you get this issue of Release and read (if you do read) this little essay of mine, I will have celebrated my fortieth birthday. In my mid- to late-twenties, I had some romantic, highly exaggerated notions about an early death – taking off at thirty-three – joining the company of Mozart, Foster, Jesus, and other immortals who checked out in their early thirties. But this was a party I didn’t get an invitation to – a gang I didn’t belong in (me not being a genius and all). So, in Chicago I had my own party – celebrating the fun of being alive as opposed to the mystique of having an untimely death.
- Rich Mullins,killed in a car crash at 41 years old
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PG20Auul1M
But when I leave I want to go out like Elijah
With a whirlwind to fuel my chariot of fire
And when I look back on the stars
It’ll be like a candlelight in Central Park
And it won’t break my heart to say goodbye.
Terrible Hunger
I remember reading a G.K. Chesterton quote: ‘Every man who ever entered a brothel went there looking for God.’ His point is, we’re looking in vain for something to satisfy this terrible hunger in us, and so often we go looking in the wrong places. Well, to borrow Chesterton’s idea, no man ever opened a book or walked into a movie theater who wasn’t looking for God. We’re drawn to stories, to songs, to paintings, buildings, faces, feasts, and laughter because they remind us of the world that was, and the world to come. The art itself is only a window. Beauty can’t satisfy; only Christ, the source of it, can.
