When we emerged on to the busy High with the traffic streaming past, we shook hands, and he said 'I shan't say goodbye. We'll meet again.' Then he plunged into the traffic. I stood there watching him. When he reached the pavement on the other side, he turned round as though he knew somehow that I would still be standing there in front of the Eastgate. Then he raised his voice in a great roar that easily overcame the noise of the cars and buses. Heads turned and at least one car swerved. 'Besides,' he bellowed with a great grin, "Christians NEVER say goodbye!'
-Sheldon Vanauken (talking about C.S. Lewis)

Where I Write a Love Poem

I'm not much of a poet, but I wrote a poem the other day. Although it is not targeted towards any man, it captures--in a small way--my own reflections on what real love is like.

I don't want to love you
At first sight

I don't want to love you
For the charm of your grin
Or your polychromatic laughter

I don't want to love you
Like I dreamed I would love you
"You", one of "them",
One of those "hippies" or "readers" or "men with a pen"
Or even one of those "blue-eyed" wonders

I want to love you
Where only grace can take us

I want to love you
With a sculptor's gaze

I want to love you
With the love that counts hairs

I want to love
you.

We were not made in God's image for nothing. The child's preference for sweets over spinach, mankind's universal love for the toothsome rather than the nutritious is the mark of our greatness, the proof that we love the secular as He does--for its secularity. We have eyes which see what He sees, lips which praise what He praises, mouths which relish things, because He first pronounced them tov. The world is no disposable ladder to heaven. Earth is not convenient, it is good; it is, by God's design, our lawful love.
Another toast then.

-Robert Capon

Fall was a difficult season for me. I was living too much in that season. The slow decay, the slipping away of life-as-we-know-it, the groggy-eyed sun's slow crawl over the earth--I took all of this far too much to heart. I took it far too personally. It felt like the world had turned into a sephia film in slow-motion.

Then Winter came, and C.S. Lewis's words were like a refrain in my heart: "It's always Winter, but never Christmas." Somehow, with the nights infringing on the waking hours, and the air commanding my body to be still, I felt the significance of Christmas in the heart of Winter. It is not until we've sunk to the bottom, our lungs emptied of air and our eyes of light, that we find deliverance.

Now I stand on the cusp of the New Year. I've never liked New Years. I've been quick to reduce it to short-lived resolutions and tasteless diet foods. But after a year with an extended autumn, after a year of limbo and a blurring of my vision, I am ready for a new context.

The rhythms and repetitions of life can be a comfort at times, the propelling tracks that help you move in one direction. But when you stare at the lines on the road, you can become a little dazed, forgetting you're heading Home. Without a destination, we might have some fun, but we are just entertaining ourselves to death. We are just parading to our grave.

But with the turning of the calendar page, with that new shiny 5 pinned onto the end, I am reminded that time moves in a horizontal line. The earth may be pacing in circles, but its orbits are numbered. They say that history repeats itself, that there is nothing new under the sun, but with the deliverance born in our winter, a narrative was fleshed out that would change our past, present, and future. The bad news is the old news we've lived inside. But the New has broken into the Old, and we have been given some very Good News. There is a Resolution to come by the One who will make all things New.

There are some friendships that feel "good" because they spread smoothly and unobtrusively into the "Friends" cubby hole, and there are other friendships that are "good" because they simply will not stay inside that box. They don't spread like silky frosting on one corner of the cake, instead they spread like melted chocolate, blazing trails that know no boundaries. They overflow into your "personal space", they find their way into your grocery list, your morning alarm, and convictions from the Spirit. They are not "good" because they are easy, for although they are full of moments of enjoyment, they are in many ways good because they are hard. 

I am talking about the good friendships that press in and press hard. I am talking about the good friendships that leave a mark. I am talking about the good friendships that make sparks as iron meets iron and both come out the sharper for it.

God has been growing a vision for what a generous spirit looks like in me, and my response has been Oh Lord, make me generous. But then the cost becomes flesh and blood, becomes real sacrifices of what I call mine. I cannot be generous with my time, resources, emotions, and attention and lock it all up. This prayer has made me realize that I need to pray for a change of heart. I am a penny hoarder, enjoying their company as I count each one dear to myself alone. One of my excuses in the past has been that my treasure to give is not silver and gold. But that doesn't seem to bother Him. If I had more, I don't doubt that it would be even more difficult to give away.



“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,  but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." -Matthew 6:19-21

O LORD,

No day of my life has passed that has not proved me guilty in thy sight.       
Prayers have been uttered from a  prayerless heart;
Praise has been often praiseless sound;
My best services are filthy rags.

Blessed Jesus, let me find a covert in thy appeasing wounds.
Though my sins rise to heaven thy merits soar above them;
Though unrighteousness weighs me down to hell, 
 thy righteousness exalts me to thy throne.
All things in me call for my rejection,
All things in thee plead my acceptance.
I appeal from the throne of perfect justice  
to thy throne of boundless grace.

Grant me to hear thy voice assuring me:  
that by thy stripes I am healed,  
that thou wast bruised for my iniquities,  
that thou hast been made sin for me 
 that I might be righteous in thee,  
that my grievous sins, my manifold sins,    
are all forgiven,  
buried in the ocean of thy concealing blood.
I am guilty, but pardoned, lost, but saved,  
wandering, but found,  
sinning, but cleansed.
Give me perpetual broken-heartedness,
Keep me always clinging to thy cross,
Flood me every moment with descending grace,
Open to me the springs of divine knowledge,  
sparkling like crystal,  
flowing clear and unsullied
through my wilderness of life.
-Valley of Vision

Go buy this book. Go buy this book.

For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. . . . Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

-David Livingstone