Nevertheless

When my soul was embittered
When I was pricked in heart
I was brutish and ignorant;
I was like a beast toward you.

Nevertheless I am continually with you;
You hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire beside you.
My flesh and my heart may fail
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

For behold, those who are far from you shall perish;
you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.
But for me it is good to be near God;
I have made the Lord God my refuge,
that I may tell of all your works.

-Psalm 73

Real World

Even though my first heroes were bus drivers
My first dream was to become a professional athlete.
And I would have been, and I could have been,
If my body had every developed beyond the larval stage.
But it didn't, of course, and so here I am
Doin what I'm doin because
Doin what I'm doin doesn't require a lot of
Physical or intellectual capabilities.
You just get up here and you do it,
And you hope you get away with it...

-Marques Bovre, "Real World"

Whan that Aprill

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

-Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Prologue

Our World Belongs to God

1. As followers of Jesus Christ,
living in this world—
which some seek to control,
but which others view with despair—
we declare with joy and trust:
Our world belongs to God!

4. Our world has fallen into sin;
but rebellion and sin can never dethrone God.
He does not abandon the work of his hand;
the heavens still declare his glory.
He preserves his world,
sending seasons, sun, and rain,
upholding his creatures,
renewing the earth,
directing all things to their purpose.
He promised a Savior;
now the whole creation groans
in the birth pangs of a new creation.

5. God holds this world
in sovereign love.
He kept his promise,
sending Jesus into the world.
He poured out his Spirit
and broadcast the news
that sinners who repent and believe in Jesus
can live
and breathe
and move again
as members of the family of God.

6. We rejoice in the goodness of God,
renounce the works of darkness,
and dedicate ourselves to holy living.
As covenant partners,
called to faithful obedience,
and set free for joyful praise,
we offer our hearts and lives
to do God's work in his world.
With tempered impatience, eager to see injustice ended,
we expect the Day of the Lord.
And we are confident
that the light which shines in the present darkness
will fill the earth when Christ appears.

Come, Lord Jesus!
Our world belongs to you.

-Our World Belongs to God (a contemporary testimony of the CRC)

Transparent Tape

Many have extolled the virtues of cellophane, but few have eulogized transparent tape. Clear tape is an excellent way to laminate, for instance, a pair of Bill Peabody earrings.

-Joy Sikorski, How to Draw a Radish, 72.

Same Thing, Every Spring

Dan, go get your jacket
It's still a little cold outside
And don't play in mud, you'll track it
And I just cleaned inside
Momma don't need a coat, he yells
As he heads down to the game
Where the field is dressed seductively
In puddles of old rain
Same thing, every Spring

All kinds of life is sproutin
Flyin round, some getting scarfed
Like mommas having babies
And their heads are popping off
Well Nate taught that to Sally
Who then taught it to Nadine
Who couldn't quite get the hang
Of poppin em off real nice and clean
Same thing, every Spring

It's time to open up the shed
Wake the hibernating bears
Old grizzly and old kodiak
Are a couple of our John Deers
It's time to plant the seeds
But the garden dirt's too hard
We'll have to borrow Andy's tiller
Ours got rusted in the yard
Same thing, every Spring

Well April has it's showers
So May has buttercups
And the birds sing every morning
That the earth is warming up
So we gather all the sweaters
All the mittens and the coats
Don't open til October
On the box somebody wrote
Same thing, every Spring

No matter how we try
To live our lives beyond the same
We'll always have the dandelions
And the puddles of old rain
Well me I kind of like the thought
There's really nothing wrong
So winter won't you join with me
A few bars of this old song
Same thing every Spring

-Ticklepenny Corner

Highs

1. Walking
2. Studying outside
3. Sunburn!

Naking

The word naked was originally a past participle; the naked man was the man who had undergone a process of naking, that is, of stripping or peeling (you used the verb of nuts and fruit). Time out of mind the naked man has seemed to our ancestors not the natural but the abnormal man; not the man who has abstained from dressing but the man who has been for some reason undressed.

-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 104.

Charity

But [Charity], though a sort of love we need, is not the sort we want. We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love of all is a terrible shock. This is so well recognized that spiteful people will pretend to be loving us with Charity precisely because they know that it will wound us...

We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do not so love it. Only the lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times—and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit—they are receiving Charity, are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them.

-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 132-133.

No Safe Investment

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 121.

Be Mirry!

Man, pleis thy makar and be mirry,
And sett not by this warld a chirry.

[Man, please thy Maker, and be merry,
And give not for this world a cherry.]

-William Dunbar, quoted by C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 90.

The Secret Master of Ceremonies

...A few more years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raise or not raise at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends “You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 89-90.

Grieving

But we do not want you to uniformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope...

-1 Thessalonians 4:13

Not the Way It's Supposed to Be

In the film Grand Canyon, an immigration attorney breaks out of a traffic jam and attempts to bypass it. His route takes him along streets that seem progressively darker and more deserted. Then the predictible Bonfire of the Vanities nightmare: his expensive car stalls on one of those alarming streets whose teenage guardians favor expensive guns and sneakers. The attorney does manage to phone for a tow truck, but before it arrives, five young street toughs surround his disabled car and threaten him with considerable bodily harm. Then, just in time, the tow truck shows up and its driver—an earnest, genial man—begins to hook up to the disabled car. The toughs protest: the truck driver is interrupting their meal. So the driver takes the leader of the group aside and attempts a five-sentence introduction to metaphysics: “Man,” he says, “the world ain’t supposed to work like this. Maybe you don’t know that, but this ain’t the way it’s supposed to be. I’m supposed to be able to do my job without askin’ you if I can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin’ him off. Everything’s supposed to be different than what it is here.”

-Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be, 7.

Marvels

Lily believed that the world was a wonderful and magical place. She believed that if you watched carefully enough, you could find miracles anywhere. The town's baseball team had a secret handshake that went back to the time of the settlers. A professor down the street had a skeleton hanging in his vestibule. Behind the dry cleaner, some ladies held newt races. There were interesting things like this everywhere, waiting to be noticed. Though Lily thought that she herself was too quiet and too boring to ever do anything interesting, she believed that if she just was watchful enough and silent enough—so silent that no one could even tell she existed—she would eventually see marvels.

-M. T. Anderson, Whales On Stilts, 2.

Happy Thursday

Happy Thursday to you,
Happy Thursday to you,
Happy Thursday, dear Alice,
Happy Thursday to you.

“Who is Alice?” asked Mother.

“Alice is somebody that nobody can see,” said Frances. “And that is why she does not have a birthday. So I am singing Happy Thursday to her.”

“Today is Friday,” said Mother.

“It is Thursday for Alice,” said Frances.

-Russell Hoban, A Birthday for Frances, 5-6.

Tidying Up

[Mrs. Darling] does not often go out to dinner, preferring when the children are in bed to sit beside them tidying up their minds, just as if they were drawers. If Wendy and the boys could keep awake they might see her repacking into their proper places the many articles of the mind that have strayed during the day, lingering humorously over some of their contents, wondering were on earth they picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When they wake in the morning the naughtinesses with which they went to bed are not, alas, blown away, but they are placed in the bottom of the drawer; and on the top, beautifully aired, are their prettier thoughts ready for the new day.

-J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, Act I.

The Size of Thoughts

Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Once in a while, a thought may come up that seems, in its woolly, ranked composure, roughly the size of one's hall closet. But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent—this is the size of thought worth thinking about.

-Nicholson Baker, The Size of Thoughts, 10.