God’s way is best; if human wisdom a fairer way may seem to show, tis only that our earth-dimmed vision the truth can never clearly know.

Beside the still waters, vol. 29, issue 4

Receiving forgiveness produces love, and love produces expressions of gratitude. So if gratitude is an expression of love based on forgiveness, lack of gratitude must be a sign that love inspired by forgiveness is missing.

Jim Yoder, Riverton, WY, Beside the Still Waters, Vol. 29, Iss. 4.

In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God.

1 Thessalonians 5:18

But the fact is that his mind came from one set of books as surely as mine has come from another set of books. But that can’t be true. …Who knows where any mind comes from. It’s all mystery.
Much more prayer is called for, clearly, but first I will take a nap.

p. 125, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson.

This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question was being put to you. So you must think, what is the lord asking me in this moment, in this situation. If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think as it were, this is an emissary sent from the lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as things would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights.

p. 124, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson.

The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of the morning. Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. So much does. Ralph Waldo Emerson is excellent on this point.

It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within existence.

p. 119, Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.

Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.

Polly B. Berends, Forward, A tap water girl in a bottled water world, Shirley Garrett.

I wish I could say that I knew. I wish I believed that this game we all play actually had an end, or a point, or some value. Some higher purpose. Some meaning. something to justify all the stress …that we impose these days upon our children and ourselves.

p. 280, Conclusion, Perfect Madness. Judith Warner.

I mean the ability to have a family, provide for your family, and go about the daily rhythms of life without it all becoming… a source of enormous anguish and anxiety.

p. 263, Perfect Madness, Judith Warner.