Best New Thing!

Best new thing!

Maybe I’m the last to find this neat little thingy but regardless, I love it!!  It is weighted and flexible not to mention colorful.  It even carries a good message:  “You ARE what you read!”  It’s almost the best purchase I’ve made this summer.

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Have you noticed...

"Have you noticed how God so often sends us books at just the right time?"  C.S. Lewis

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Keep moving!

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must
keep moving."  ~ Albert Einstein


Isn't this the way most days seem?

When we're trying so hard for this!

 

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Yours, Jack

I am a consummate highlighter when I read a book. I like to be able to flip through the pages of a book I’ve read and quickly find the passages that encouraged or inspired me. However, I’m finding that if I were to highlight in Yours, Jack – which I can’t since it isn’t mine – which is another reason to read your own books – the entire book would be page after page of pink highlighter!! The subtitle of this book is “Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis” and never a more accurate summary was penned.

From this morning’s reading of a May 8, 1939 letter came this simple, yet at the same time profound, observation:

“The process of living seems to consist in coming to realise truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. They cannot sound otherwise to those who have not had the relevant experience; that is why there is no real teaching of such truths possible and every generation starts from scratch.” C.S. Lewis - Yours, Jack

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Unimpeded Obedience!

“What indeed can we imagine Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water.”

C.S. Lewis, Yours, Jack

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Morning Coffee - Leveling Up!

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One of the main goals of playing FarmVille (a computer farming game) is to gather points and thus be able to move up from one level of farming to the next. “Leveling up” is what this is called in the roll playing game world. As you level up you gain more knowledge of the game which in turn makes you a stronger and more powerful player. Making and marking that progress is what keeps you engaged.

Kirk Byron Jones, in his book, Morning B.R.E.W. asks, “Do you have a sense of ‘leveling up’ in life? Expect and explore raised levels of awareness, energy, creativity, and wonder. Consciously level up; grow in strength, with purpose and with passion. Give yourself permission to be strong and stronger. Do not fear your strength but leap towards it.”

At his suggestion I believe I will pour another cup of coffee and plan some “leveling up” strategy for today! I will measure and mark my progress and challenge myself to reach for higher and higher levels. I will stay engaged and play to win!

I hope you have a fun and challenging day, too!

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Clive Staples Lewis (1898 - 1963)

My son Chris gave me the book Yours, Jack by C.S. Lewis to take a look at. And I began to do just that this morning. From the jacket:

"C.S. Lewis spent a good portion of each day corresponding with people via hand-written letters. Over his lifetime he wrote thousands of letters in which he offered his friends and acquaintances advice on the Christian life, giving away a bit of himself to each of these correspondents as he signed his notes with a heartfelt and familiar, ‘yours, Jack.’ Most of these letters are currently only available in their entirety – a collection consisting of three hefty tomes. Yours, Jack features the best inspirational readings and sage counsel culled from C.S. Lewis’s letters, offering an accessible look at this great author’s personal vision for the spiritual life.”

I am always taken back by the lengthy and detailed letters that were once almost common place; carefully crafted hand written missives detailing both ordinary life as well as the most private of thoughts. I believe this will be an interesting book to read as C.S. Lewis, the man, emerges.

15 June 1930 [age 32]

“We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that, because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I am appalled to see how much of the change which I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself – to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed, and then to find yourself still in bed…”

Yes, this will be an interesting – and inspirational - read.

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Morning Coffee

“How much time have you given to wondering what God is doing with you? It is not your business. Your part is to acknowledge God in all your ways, and He will blend the active and the spiritual until they are inseparable and you learn to live in activities knowing that your life is hid with Christ in God.”

“The attitude of a Christian towards the providential order in which he is placed is to recognize that God is behind it for purposes of His own.”

Oswald Chambers

Why is it that I want to define and categorize my circumstances - with my short-sighted, limited vision - when I know full well that God’s view of my life is infinite and unfathomable? Whose vision do I really want?  Whose path do I truly want to follow?  On paper it is crystal clear; so why do I make it so complicated?

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.   Romans 8:28

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It is the Dance!

“In pondering Christ, you find that you are in fact living His life, and God is living yours.  Christ in you and you in Christ.  God doesn’t lead you through phases or steps; He draws you to Himself in continuous motion.  What we often have viewed as stages or phases may be a change in music.  But the point is never the music.  It is the dance.  The music is often part of the dance.  But sometimes the most beautiful dance is the one where you and your partner make up the music as you dance together.”

From Jesus Manifesto by Sweet and Viola

What a wonderful image to carry into the day!

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God's Three Step Program!

"It's one thing to work for God.  It's another to work with God.  And yet it's another to  have God work through you.  The work of God is God Himself at work."

From Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola.

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The Best Way Out is Through

The Best Way Out is Through 

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Morning Thought

It is comforting to know that the God who guides us sees
tomorrow more clearly than we see yesterday.

~ Author Unknown

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Morning Coffee

"Cheerfulness and contentment are great beautifiers and are famous preservers of youthful looks." ~ Charles Dickens

I believe I'll have another cup of coffee and gather more of those "preservers of youthful looks"!  (-:

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He Will Always Break Out!

From the New York Times
July 15, 2010:
“The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.”

"At a news conference at the Vatican, Msgr. Charles Scicluna, the Vatican's internal prosecutor in charge of handling sexual abuse cases, explained the change on women's ordination in technical terms. 'Sexual abuse and pornography are more grave delicts; they are an egregious violation of moral law,' Scicluna said in his first public appearance since the sex abuse crisis hit. 'Attempted ordination of women is grave, but on another level, it is a wound that is an attempt against the Catholic faith on the sacramental orders.'

"The revision codifies a 2007 ruling that made attempting to ordain women an offense punishable with excommunication. The new document said that a priest who tried to ordain a woman could now be defrocked."



From Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola

“Christianity centers not on points, principles, and proposition, but on a person and a people.”

“Therefore Christianity has nothing to do with our vaunted religious subjectivity, and everything to do with the greatness of God’s gift of Himself in the first-century Jewish rabble-rouser named Jesus of Nazareth.”

“Christ is too immense, too imponderable, too alive to be tied into any immovable system of thought constructed by finite humans.”

“He will always break out!”

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It's a Beautiful Day!!

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Won't you be my neighbor!!

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Am I Experiencing Jesus or Serving a god?

"Jesus isn't a cause; He is a real and living person who can be known, loved, experienced, enthroned, and embodied.  Focusing on His cause doesn't equate with focusing on or following Him.  It's all too possible to serve the 'god' of serving Jesus..."  Jesus Manifesto by Sweet and Viola

"It's all too possible to serve the 'god' of serving Jesus" This sentence keeps drawing me back for thought and reflection. Not only is it "all too possible" but it is also all too easy.  Way too easy!

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Morning Coffee

Thought for the day rest of my life! From Jesus Manifesto by Sweet and Viola.

4Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.  2 Peter 1:4

“We have been given God’s ‘Spirit’, which makes Christ ‘real’ in our lives. We can actually now, as Peter puts it, ‘participate in the divine nature’. How, then, in the face of so great a truth, can we ask for toys and trinkets? How can we lust after lesser gifts and itch for religious and spiritual ‘thingies’? We’ve been touched from on high by the fires of the Almighty and given divine life, a life that has passed through death – the very resurrection life of the Son of God Himself. How can we not be fired up?”

What a great thought; a perfect daily devotion to reflect on with my first cup of coffee! 

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Today in History

Today, July 11^th,  is the birthday of John Quincy Adams.  John Quincy, born in 1767, was our sixth president and was the son of John Adams, our second president.  To learn more about John Adams and his son John Quincy, I highly recommend the book, John Adams by David McCullough.  An excellent book!

 “Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.”
~ John Adams

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.   John Quincy Adams

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Morning Coffee - Thought for the Day

Pray, and let God worry.

-- Martin Luther

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Why chase anything else?

My son passed on to me his copy of Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola. He read and reviewed this book for Booksneeze. (His review is here.) I am only as far as Chapter 2 but have found it very interesting as well as inspirational.


From the book, Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola:

Colossians 1:27
…to [you] God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

“…this glorious, limitless, amazing, incredible, expansive, incomparable, marvelous, stunning, staggering, majestic, mighty, matchless, spectacular, outstanding, tremendous, immense, infinite, vast, grand, triumphant, victorious, precious, radiant, peerless, wonderful, magnificent Christ has chosen to place all of his fullness where?”

“Inside of you!”

“Why, then,” Sweet and Viola ask “would [I] chase anything else?”

Good question!!

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Morning Coffee

“As the sea gull lays in the wind current, so I lay myself into the spirit of God.”  ~ Howard Thurman

What a perfect picture of how we should go about our day. I believe I’ll have another cup of coffee and quietly begin to “lay into the spirit of God”.

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Rookie of the Year!

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My favorite Brown-Eyed Girl!

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Prayer for our Nation

"Most gracious God, we give thee hearty thanks for this good land in which our heritage is cast, for freedom to worship thee, for the glory of a people set at liberty, for the government in which we share.  Keep us ever mindful of the responsibilities thereby laid upon us and faithful to our trust; through him who is the truth that alone can make men free, even thy son Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen"

The Book of Prayers

Leon and Elfreida McCauley

c1954

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God Wins! God Wins! God Wins!

Just this morning I finished reading Esther - A Woman of Strength and Dignity by Charles Swindoll. What an incredible and deep story is told in the book of Esther. There is a whole cast of interesting characters from a powerful king and evil villain to the very beautiful heroine - not to mention the  numerous twists and turns in the plot. All the makings of a New York Times bestseller!

But the best part of the story is the message that emerges; the message that no matter how bad things might look for a time, in the end God does win.

As Swindoll writes in his conclusion:

“As we learned in our study of Esther’s story, His hand moves invisibly, yet with invincibility, bringing His sovereign plan to completion. It includes haunting delays that seen unfair, human decisions that lack compassion, harmful deeds that bring others anguish, and hurtful disappointments that make us question God’s goodness. Nevertheless, He pursues with persistence and He refuses to be distracted. In the end, I repeat, God wins. What great comfort that brings!”

God does indeed win!

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