What if all the boring parts matter to God?

“Yet God made us to spend our days in rest, work, and play, taking care of our bodies, our families, our neighborhoods, our homes. What if all these boring parts matter to God? What if days passed in ways that feel small and insignificant to us are weighty with meaning and part of the abundant life that God has for us?…

“I like big ideas. I can get drunk on talk of justification, ecclesiology, pneumatology, Christology, and eschatology. But these big ideas are borne out - lived believed, and enfleshed - in the small moments of our day, in the places, seasons, homes, and communities that compose our lives.”

-Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

I cannot recommend this book enough.

Philippians 4:6

Deeper Magic

"Oh, you're real, you're real! Oh, Aslan!" cried Lucy and both girls flung themselves upon him and covered him with kisses.

"But what does it all mean?" asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer.

"It means," said Aslan, "that thought the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards." (emphasis added)

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

A Few Quotes

As I work through Mere Christianity, I thought I'd post a few quotes that are worth remembering:

"God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level witht the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

After that amazing chapter, I start to wonder why I am not reading a little of this book every day? Why do I put it off so often? What good reminders of the kind of God we serve.

Psalm 139

This Psalm has become particularly meaningful as I think about the baby developing right now.  It is very comforting to know that God is tending for my baby, even when I don't know how it is doing.

1 O LORD, you have searched me and you know me.  2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.

3 You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.

4 Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD.

5 You hem me in—behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.

7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?

8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,

10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,”

12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

A Quote

I just finished reading Reaching for the Invisible God by Philip Yancey, so (just to warn you) you will be subjected to quotes from it for the next couple weeks!  Here is the first, which I chose because I feel like it is talking about me.

A person reared in a Christian home, who has absorbed the faith along with other family values from trusted parents, will one day face a crisis that puts loyalty to the test. She may have had religious experiences, may have felt something of the closeness of God. Without warning, that sense vanishes. She feels nothing except doubts over all that has gone before. Faith loses all support of feeling, and she wonders if she has been living under illusion. At such a moment it may feel very foolish to hold on to faith regardless. Yet, as Ignatius [Loyola] counsels, now is the time to "stand firm." Faith can survive periods of darkness but only if we cling to it in the midst of the darkness.

Short excerpt from the book I'm reading.

"In an act of great tenderness, God visited Elijah in his time of despair [I Kings 19].  What happened next speaks volumes about what style works best when an omnipotent God decides to communicate with tiny human beings:

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

The gentle whisper, Elijah heard.  God had accommodated himself to his prophet in a soft voice almost like silence."

-Philip Yancey Reaching for the Invisible God

the difference between boys and girls...

“Ron,” said Hermione in a dignified voice, dipping the point of her quill into her ink pot, “you are the most insensitive wart I have ever had the misfortune to meet.”“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Ron indignantly. “What sort of person cries while someone’s kissing them?” “Yeah,” said Harry, slightly desperately, “who does?” Hermione looked at the pair of them with an almost pitying expression on her face. “Don’t you understand how Cho’s feeling at the moment?” she asked. “No,” said Harry and Ron together. Hermione sighed and laid down her quill. “Well, obviously, she’s feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying. Then I expect she’s feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can’t work out who she likes best. Then she’ll be feeling guilty, thinking it’s an insult to Cedric’s memory to be kissing Harry at all, and she’ll be worrying about what everyone else might say about her if she starts going out with Harry. And she probably can’t work out what her feelings toward Harry are anyway, because he was the one who was with Cedric when Cedric died, so that’s all very mixed up and painful. Oh, and she’s afraid she’s going to be thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch team because she’s been flying so badly.” A slightly stunned silence greeted the end of this speech, then Ron said, “One person can’t feel all that at once, they’d explode.” “Just because you’ve got the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all have,” said Hermione nastily, picking up her quill again.

excerpt from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix