My God, You gave me this restlessness, this urge to get busy. Grant me the purpose to know what I need to do with it and the courage and commitment to follow through even when this surge of energy ebbs.

Day 1, Beside Still Waters, Thomas Kinkade

But often we have viewpoints too narrow to include the perspective of our God, who sees the big picture.

Leroy Amstutz, Hope, IN, Beside the Still Waters, Vol. 30, Issue 1.

A a loopy line of ink, stretching on and on, referencing the past and demanding a future. Memory and hope spinning out in an endless trail of paper. It would have been easy to see all those blackened pages as something highly abstract, having at best a specific reality expressed only by other paper in the form of currency. But the reality was otherwise. It found its truest expression in something as fundamental as dirt. Land. And, ultimately, the life – plant and animal and human – that can exist atop it. I never let that slip from my mind.

p. 303, Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier

Love is flower-like; friendship is like a sheltering tree.

“Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

“Beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.”

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve past, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin striped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final.

p. 21, Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier

The February sunshine steeps your boughs and tints the buds and swells the leaves within.

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips it’s turn.