Best I love September's yellow
Morns of dew strung gossamer,
Thoughtful days without a stir;
Rooky clamours, brazen leaves,
Stubble dotted o'er with sheaves-
More than Spring's bright uncontrol
Suit the Autumn of my soul.

~Alexander Smith

But love is the first comforter, and where love and truth speak, the love will be understood even where the truth is not. Love indeed is the highest in all truth; and the pressure of a hand, a kiss, the caress of a child, will do more to save, sometimes, than the wisest argument, even when rightly understood. Love alone is wisdom, love alone is power. And where love seems to fail, it is where self has stepped between and dulled the potency of its rays.

~George MacDonald, The Lady's Confession
ed. Michael Phillips

There is a comfort in the strength of love;
'Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart...

~William Wordsworth, "Michael: A Pastoral Poem"

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

~Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and voices of the night.

~Kahlil Gibran,
The Prophet

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

Dreaming Eyes of Wonder

A friend shared these resolutions with me, ones he loves to emulate and thought I would enjoy. They were written by Clyde Kilby, a professor a Wheaton College, quite a few years ago now.

1.) At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.

2.) Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death, when he said: “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendour, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”

3.) I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence but, just as likely, ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.

4.) I shall not turn my life into a thin straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.

5.) I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.

6.) I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are, but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic” existence.

7.) I shall follow Darwin’s advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.

8.) I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, “fulfill the moment as the moment.” I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now.

9.) If for nothing more than the sake of a change of view, I shall assume my ancestry to be from the heavens rather than from the caves.

10.) Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this veryday, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the Architect who calls Himself Alpha and Omega.

11.) I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the “child of thepure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder.”

Morning Has Broken
Traditional Song, Lyrics by Eleanor Farjeon

Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for the springing fresh from the world

Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dewfall, on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God's recreation of the new day

Where are Men
When they're Not at Home?

Different places.
Some are out at the barn checking on the mare that's about to foal.
I know, not many now.
A few.

Some are running down to the corner store to pick up something they forgot.
Be right back.

Some are in offices practicing pitches. Spiels.

Some are phoning from offices—saying they'll be late.

Of course, many are dead.
You suddenly think about them because you're back where you haven't been
in 20 years
and go to look them up.
But they're not there.
Just some widows.

But most are way off somewhere searching for fathers who were never home enough.

"Where are Men When they're Not at Home?" by Reid Bush, from What You Know. © Larkspur Press, discovered on Bob Nickles' blog, The Back Burner.

Perhaps argument and teaching, too, cannot reach all men, but the soul of the listener, like the earth which is to nourish the seed, should first be cultivated by habit to enjoy or hate things properly; for he who lives according to passion would neither listen to an argument which dissuades him nor understand it, and if he is disposed in this manner, how can he be persuaded to change?

~Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Apostle

I would not be anywhere else but in this hardest of fields with an invincible Christ... I am full of hope that when God delays in fulfilling our little thoughts, it is to leave Himself room to work out His great ones. And, more and more as times goes on, I feel that the longer He waits the more we can expect, for the deeper and wider will be the undermining, and the greater will be the band of those who will come forth free from their prison walls. When one gets hold of that vision, one can throw back in the devil's face his taunts over the seemingly wasted years that lie behind us.
~Lillias Trotter
(a gem discovered at MargaretAshwood.com)

"What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it."

~C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

"What is grace? It is the inspiration from on high: it is love; it is liberty. Grace is the spirit of law. This discovery of the spirit of law belongs to St. Paul; and what he calls 'grace' from a heavenly point of view, we from and earthly point, call 'righteousness.'"
~Victor Hugo, (1802-1885)
French Novelist

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point."
~C. S. Lewis

“Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith” (Heb. 12:2).

A blank page. Spells potential. Inspiring. Intimidating. Kind of like the future. Frightening. I’ve felt that way about my future. Sometimes, still do. It’s good to know Someone else is writing the story of my life.

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired and success achieved."

~Helen Keller

“When we come to the edge of the light we know, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, of this we can be sure…either God will provide something solid to stand on or…we will be taught to fly.”

~Author unknown

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year~
"Give me a light that I might tread safely into the unknown."
And he replied,
"Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way."

~M.L. Haskins (Quoted by His Majesty the King in an empire broadcast.)

God is good, all the time. All the time, God is good. That means even in these periods of confusion and trials of faith. God is good! I don't have direction, but I have Him beside me; that is better than thinking I know where to go on my own.

Not only do I have the hand of God when the world is dark, I have His Word, a lamp for my feet and a light for my path. The five foolish virgins had lamps but no light because their oil ran out. If I have His Word, but not His Spirit, my lamp will not light my way. If I have His Spirit but neglect His Word, there is no context for the oil of His Spirit to flow. Do I have His Word and does His Spirit flow through my life? Then that Word can enlighten my path. "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path" (Psalm 119:105).

When God Says Wait
"The word spoken to me has been to be ready to go, but also to wait on God’s timing."
by Gabe Reese (90&9.com)