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Reading list thus far

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I realized the other day I hadn’t yet written down any of the books I’ve read this year. I thought back to my bedside stacks, and this is what I came up with.

Farewell to the East End (Jennifer Worth)
The Geography of Nowhere (James Howard Kunstler)
Longbourn (Jo Baker)
Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder) – Read aloud with Arden
Pilgrim’s Inn (Elizabeth Goudge)
The Bird in the Tree (Elizabeth Goudge)
The Heart of the Family (Elizabeth Goudge)
On Hope (Josef Pieper)
The Gospel of the Kingdom (George Eldon Ladd)
Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society (John Lane) 
It’s been a long, stormy winter, which has been a definite benefit for the book list! Things may slow down as spring picks up. 
On the “To Read” list for the rest of the year:
Emma (Jane Austen)
Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis) – it’s been a few years since I’ve read this one
Revelation (Joseph Mangina) – a few chapters left
More Elizabeth Goudge
~lg 
~lg
spring

Fools of Spring

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May Day, and the bells ring out in distant Oxford, and the grass grows green on the sunny side of the house, and the blackbirds make a racket in the bracken, and we are shouting the same glad song for winter’s death with each stomp of our rubber boots.
Spring turns us all into yabbering fools, sprouting sincere, if unoriginal, poetry. And why not? Spring awakens our childlikeness. No one has ever said of a child’s first stab at a cat or the sun or their father, “Not bad, but I think it’s been done before.”
We are children, delighting in life and trying to get at its very essence, and all we have are shadow words next to its glory. Yet that should not, must not, stop us, for part of the glory we share is this urge of reproduction, the desire to create, and in creating to somehow comprehend our own origins in the freshness deep down.

Spring is not notable for its originality, but for its origin. God makes the spring come to Oxford and our island alike, this I tell my son. Woven into the patterns of the earth, spun up in its turning, spring is the recurring invitation to become the child we were born to be. 

~lg

love

Oceans Deep: The Call to Love

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The wildest call is always to love.

The most dangerous waters He calls us to walk on are these: love your neighbour as yourself, and love your enemy. 

But who among us can walk on water? Who can carry this burden? A heart can break under the weight. The fear will sink us. We have not what we need to follow this strange and narrow path.

But when there is doubt we fix our eyes on the one who has gone before us over these waves. And not only over, but into, beneath, right down to the depths of the ocean of hate and sin and death, and everything that threatens to swallow us whole. He took love to the outer limits, and seemed to succumb . . .

But perfect love cannot be overcome.

He overcame by the power of pure love, pulling our soggy mess out of the sea and breathing new life into collapsed lungs.

He breathes His love into us, and fear evaporates.
He breathes His love into us, and hatred dissipates.
He breathes His love into us, His Spirit of life, and we are filled with a buoyancy that lets us take the first steps.

The call to love is no walk in the park, no pleasure sail on the pond.

It’s a walk on the wild, past the point of no return, where our only hope is to follow Him.

~lg

hard things/Intercessions/prayer

Intercessions: God of tears and dust

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O God, most gracious and compassionate, you hold our frailty in your hands. Man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, you know our weaknesses. You gather us in your arms, tenderly wash the mingled tears and dust, and fold us in your keeping. You weep with us. You weep for the whole weary world, swollen with the sting of death.

O God, most gracious and compassionate, you take our burdens in your hands. You hold the things we cannot carry, and carry them away this night.

~lg

faith/hope/kingdom/Kingdom Field Notes/nature/spring

Kingdom Field Notes: Mother Junco’s Secret

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Little mother junco knows a secret. The tilt of her head outside the kitchen window tells me so. She knows the place where heaven and earth meet, somewhere in the branches of a great tree. There she will build her nest, and lay her treasures to rest.

She has found a seed. The one that falls into the earth and dies. And it will be her kingdom.

She has a dark eye for the small things, little mother junco.

And how she will sing on the day of new birth, when the pale blue egg breaks open like a morning sky to welcome the sun!

Until then, she laughs at the snow, her faith the evidence of things unseen, and her secret keeps her warm.

~lg