Good Things Run Wild

“They keep coming up new all the time - things to perplex you, you know. You settle one question and there's another right after. There are so many things to be thought over and decided when you're beginning to grow up. It keeps me busy all the time thinking them over and deciding what's right. It's a serious thing to grow up, isn't it, Marilla?” (Lucy Maud Montgomery) For all the ways Christians in "Christian Culture" today can grow, I don't know any topic that wouldn't improved by admitting we don't know everything more often. We don't ALWAYS have a defending, prepared answer ready. I'll never forget the life-changing value this admittance had on my life. ---- Don Shorey's Rule Number 8 in "12 Small Rules To Get Over Ourselves and Take A Deep Breath": https://www.instagram.com/p/CKXETNXBc7Q/

“Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?” J.M. Barrie Expounding on the concept, heart of, richness-available, and "best of" self-care... and God's heart for us. ---- Maker's Hollow Conversations On Rest, as mentioned in this episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s2e02-on-rest-makers-hollow-conversations-episode-1/id1507890671?i=1000512052786

Not a persuasion piece on why anyone else "should want," but a personal testimony on why I *wanted* to be a mother before I was one. “And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you- I am at rest with you- I have come home.” (Dorothy L. Sayers)

In-between "me" and "him and then the "us" was a time where our lives merged. The first memories of us as us. This is a sacred, living, continued stage that should take you "there" as often as possible. "To me it is really important to live in what I call the spaces in-between. Bus stations, trains, taxis, or waiting rooms in airports are the best places because you are open to destiny, you are open to everything and anything can happen." (Marina Abramovic)

"We must bless without wanting to manipulate. Without insisting that everything be straightened out right now. Without insisting that our truth be known.  This means simply turning whoever it is we need to bless over to God, knowing that God’s powerful love will do what our own feeble love or lack of it won’t." (Madeleine L’Engle) A few thoughts from someone who has been carried through hardship over and over, and wants you to know how impactful the little efforts to ease and show up are. Thank YOU.

I cringe a little when "people" insist we need to be dreaming BIG. In relation to size, only. “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” (Eleanor Roosevelt) Some GOOD dreams may have large ramifications and ideas, and that is beautiful. But other good dreams are deliciously simple. Dream well!

On paying attention and being grateful! "It all matters. That someone turns off the lamp, says hello to the invalid, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says goodnight, resists temptation, wipes the counter, makes the bed, tips the waitress, remembers the illness, congratulated the successes, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the heart. What is most beautiful, is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed." L. McBride

Thinking through the importance of "ask, and it will be given to you." Starting with these words from Fred Rogers:"In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers."

Primarily dwelling in the last two chapters of scripture, Revelation 21 + 22, to frame a view of compassionate hearts, action, and hope as we live, learn, and endure all this life means. How to "suffer with," like the word compassion means.

A special joint-episode podcast with Don Shorey from No Mere Mortals. Talking about story in Part 1 right here! Go to "No Mere Mortals" episode #8 for Part 2! "Life is a story. Why do we die? Because we live. Why do we live? Because our Maker opened His mouth and began to tell a story. Do not fear the shadowy places. You will never be the first one there. Another went ahead and down until He came out the other side.  Drink your wine. Laugh from your gut. Burden your moments with thankfulness. Be as empty as you can be when that clock winds down. Spend your life. And if time is a river, may you leave a wake." (N.D. Wilson)

Reading an excerpt from chapter 9 of my book "Meet Mama Bear." "Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast, hull and spar as she was when she left my side. And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And, just at the moment when someone says, 'There, she is gone,' there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout, 'Here she comes!' And that is dying." (Henry Van Dyke)

Pressing into Pope Benedict the 16th's words at a gathering of artists: "The world in which we live runs the risk of being altered beyond recognition because of unwise human actions which, instead of cultivating its beauty, unscrupulously exploit its resources for the advantage of a few and not infrequently disfigure the marvels of nature. What is capable of restoring enthusiasm and confidence, what can encourage the human spirit to rediscover its path, to raise its eyes to the horizon, to dream of a life worthy of its vocation – if not beauty?"

Encouragement and hope starting with these words from William Faulkner, especially for those that home has been a place of pain: “I give you this not that you may remember time, but that you may forget about it for a little while. I can only tell you that time is me turning and turning while the world is turning around a star that turns around a center that turns around the all of space. Among all the other things, all the turning animals and all the turning worlds, there is me... turning to you."

Considering Dorothy Sayers words in "Mind of the Maker": "Looking at man, something is essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what is written about the original upon which the 'image' of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, 'God created.' The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things." 

Considering the "doing" we are called to via Marilynne Robinson's words: "Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

Focusing today on Annie Dillard's lines from “For the Time Being": “You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants’ murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world of ordinary days ‘affords’ us that precise association with God that redeems both us and our speck of world."

On lines from chapter 29 of "The Screwtape Letters" by CS Lewis": “He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful until it became risky.”

Considering a paragraph from an article called "Lighten Up, Christians! God Loves A Good Time" by ND Wilson, “We say we want to be like God, and we feel we mean it. But we don't. Not to be harsh, but if we did really mean it, we would be having a lot more fun than we are. We aim for safety and cultural respectability instead of following our stated first principles: that we are made in God's image and should strive to imitate him. We live as if God were an infinite list of negatives. He is holiness, the rawest and richest of all purity. In our bent way of thinking, that makes him the biggest stress-out of all. But holiness is nothing like a building code. Holiness is 80-year-old hands crafting an apple pie for others, again.”

Borrowing and running with a line from "Orthodoxy" by GK Chesterton, let's expound on the theme of this podcast: “And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”