Some quotes to encourage you along the way.

If you’re called to speak light into the darkness, then believe this: the darkness wants to shut you up. Andrew Peterson, Adorning the Dark

It is our job, it is our ministry, it is the sword we swing in the Kingdom, to remind children that the good guys win, that the stories are true, and that a fool’s hope may be the best kind. Andrew Peterson, Adorning the Dark

The pure light walks the earth; the darkness, received into the heart of Deity, is there swallowed up. Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned? C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

“In this phial,’ she said, ‘is caught the light of Eärendil’s star, set amid the waters of my fountain. It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.” JRR Tolkien, Galadriel in The Two Towers

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. JRR Tolkien, The Return of the King

Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. Psalm 119:105

The Lord bless you and keep you, friends.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

Many years ago we bought an X-Box Kinect. It was an absolute marvel of technology. We had a lot of fun setting it up, creating our own individual avatars and then watching the avatar do whatever we did. Like all amazing technologies, we only had the barest glimmer of what it took to bring that thing into being and make it work. The next morning, I looked out the window and saw our trees. They left the X-Box way behind. All the scientists and engineers in the world, working their brains into a frenzy, couldn’t make the simplest unit of life – a cell – much less a tree. Time and chance, given a million, trillion, years, couldn’t make any of these:

Admit it once and for all – evolution is silly. The emperor has no clothes!

I’ll probably delete this in the morning, but you should continue to think on it.

I’m not sure I should tell you this, but…I spent some time this afternoon stalking a wild chickadee. I’ll get back to that.

I’ve been reading a book by C.S. Lewis called Letters to Malcolm – Chiefly on Prayer. Lewis operates on a different intellectual plane than most of us; certainly, he’s miles above me. I read The Abolition of Man once to my two youngest when they were in 8th and 9th grade. I had to stop after every other paragraph so we could try to grasp what he had written, but it was like trying to catch a wild bird – we always ended up with just feathers in our hands. Was this is the same man who wrote my favorite books: The Chronicles of Narnia, which I have read over and over and over?

I was worried that this book would also be so far out of my reach that I’d just catch glimpses now and again of Lewis flitting about on the highest branches. But this morning I read a paragraph in that book that made me laugh with recognition. Maybe he and I are not so far apart, for he says this about prayer:

Well, let’s now at any rate come clean. Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or solving a cross-word puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us.

Oh yes, Jack and I are in the same room after all – I see him quite clearly, and he definitely sees me.

I was outside for awhile this afternoon, but my walking turned into stalking. I could hear that bird, I could hear quite a few of them way up high. I thought if I stood still silently out in the snow, under the trees and just waited, my waiting would be rewarded. Never mind the cold! Surely, a bird would eventually show itself. I watched and waited. There! Way up high – I see you! I got a photo, a very poor photo, of a little bird body almost indistinguishable from the branches. You shall not see it. After 15 minutes or so, I walked over to the back door, thinking it was time to call it a day. I turned around and there he was. I saw him. He saw me. And then we went our separate ways.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

Those of you who follow this blog (a small, but statistically significant group) will have noticed that I frequently throw in some poetry. Although I would hesitate to assign the title “poet” to myself, I have noticed that I often need poetry when I write. I haven’t even traditionally been a big fan of poetry until the last year or so. (As an aside, I want to give a shout out to the podcast “The Daily Poem,” which has helped whet my appetite for different kinds of poetry. There’s only one poem read out loud per day and each podcast is only 7-10 minutes long, Monday through Friday. Check it out!)

Back to the original discussion, some poetry seems inaccessible and I haven’t really had to patience to slog through the obtuse mental meanderings of someone else. Have you ever felt like that? Maybe you’ve felt like that when reading my poetry. 🙂 And yet, when I have need of it, nothing else will do.

Here’s a poem I wrote when I was in my early 20’s. God was calling my name, but I had lots of doubts and questions and since I have always loved writing letters, I decided to write one to Him and sort of have it out, as it were.

Correspondence
Dear Deity
of dubious gender:
Show me your garden
of infinite splendor.
Tell me truly
(between you and me)
is being omnipotent
all it’s cracked up to be?
Give me a sign,
not a bush all aflame,
send me a breeze
that whispers my name.
Or maybe tomorrow
when I open my eyes,
bring me a mood
to match the sunrise.
You see, O Great One,
I don’t lack respect,
but without definition
what can you expect?
I must also confess
I question with despair –
can this nebulous concept
even hear my prayers?
Well, enough of my queries,
but one last request:
to the souls I know,
please give my best.
And if you should happen
to pass through my town,
I hope you’ll come see me
and prove you’re a noun.
Best regards,
Lynn B.

I want it on record that He did, indeed, answer my questions and prove He is a noun. Maybe I’ll write more on that in future blog posts…

Here’s what I saw on my walk today:

I think I scared them away.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

Early this morning, I looked out one of our windows and saw the crescent moon.

It’s not a great photo because I had to take it through the glass and the window screen – there are limits to how devoted I am to getting a good shot, especially from the second floor. However, it reminded me of a time in our homeschooling experience many years ago. We were using a science curriculum that was very hands-on called Science the Search. Almost all of the learning was done by observation, not by reading a text about the subject. This particular lesson was on the moon. We were instructed to wait until the first day of the full moon to start and on that evening, we were to take notes on when the moon came out, how high in the sky it was, what it looked like, etc.. And then we were to do the same thing for the whole month. On the first night we went out with our papers on clipboards and made our notes. Check. We went out the second night at the same time and were perplexed to find out that the moon didn’t show up until 45 minutes or so later. And so it went for the rest of the month. Well, it’s certainly understandable that our young children didn’t realize what the moon cycle was all about, but I was shocked that in all my 40+ years of living, I’d never even noticed that the moon rose at a different time each night, going all the way through the 24-hour cycle throughout the month. Eureka! That was a great homeschooling moment for me, although plenty embarrassing. How could I not have known?

The works of the LORD are great, studied by all who have pleasure in them. Psalm 111:2

This amazing world is such a grand testimony to God’s greatness – it’s a shame I don’t always pay attention to what He is saying right outside my windows.

By the way, my great ignorance about the moon is just between you and me. I wouldn’t want too many people to know what an airhead I’ve been.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

Writer’s block alert! I knew that if I tried to do a daily blog, the day would come when I’d be thinking “I’ve got nothing.” Today is that day. All I’ve got is a poem, and you probably hate poems. Admit it! You hate poems! Oh gosh, I need to get a grip.

I saw the empty feeder,
And felt a pang of shame,
But if winter birds are starving,
I’m surely not to blame.

And then I heard the call,
The song of the chickadee.
The bird itself was hidden,
I looked, but could not see.

He wasn’t on the wires,
Nor winging in the sky,
He’d call and then avoid me,
I think we all know why.

I watched the trees and branches,
I looked from side to side,
A crow cawed, “Look behind you!”
I turned, but the crow had lied.

The chickadee kept on singing,
It really seemed like taunting.
I guess I’ll fill the feeder,
To stop this awful haunting.

Like I said, I’ve got nothing! Tomorrow, I might have to start writing about puffins.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning (right after I fill the bird feeder. That’s right, I STILL haven’t done it!)

I’ve been musing about how to contribute to this blog on a Sunday. I want to rest from my writing labors, so to speak, but don’t want to abandon the blog altogether. I’ve decided to share with you some of the gleanings from what I’ve been reading each week. May the writings of these Christians in some way edify and encourage you and bring you godly enlightenment. I’ll post one of my favorite photos from each week at the end.

Selections from the Tabletalk of Martin Luther
Heaven and earth, the castles and palaces of all Emperors, Kings, and Princes, are no way sufficient to make a dwelling-place for God; yet, in a silly human creature that keepeth his Word he will dwell. 

No man, without trials and temptations, can attain to the true understanding of the Holy Scriptures.

When one asked where God was before Heaven was created, St. Austin made answer thereunto and said, He was in himself.  And as another, said Luther, asked me the same question, I said, He was building Hell for such idle, presumptuous, fluttering spirits and inquisitors. [note: this quote actually made me laugh out loud. Oh, Luther!]

The Golden Alphabet, an Exposition on Psalm 119 by Charles Spurgeon
He who made us desire to learn will be sure to satisfy the desire.

If God keeps us, we will keep His way, and it is a great comfort to know that it is God’s way to keep the feet of His saints in the right way. Yet we are to watch as if our keeping of the way depended wholly on ourselves, because according to this verse [v. 33], our perseverance does not rest on any force or compulsion, but on the teaching of the Lord.

We are in a state of complicated ruin, from which nothing but grace can deliver us.

He who delights in the law should not doubt that he will be enabled to run in its ways, for the feet are sure to follow where the heart already finds its joy.

Finding Truth by Nancy Pearcey
We encounter postmodernism most often in the form of political correctness. Multiculturalism. Identity politics. Speech codes. Rules for politically correct speech have become de rigueur in most social institutions.

Postmodernism virtually defines a person’s identity in terms of the groups to which he or she belongs.

Materialism reduces humans to products of physical forces. Postmodernism reduces them to products of social forces. Whenever a philosophy absolutizes something less than God—no matter what it is—the result is reductionism, a lower view of the human person.

By contrast, Christianity offers a transcendent truth—a perspective not bound by the spirit of the age. It liberates individuals to think critically about the prevailing ethos.

Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, by C.S. Lewis
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don’t agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ. …we all try to accept with some sort of submission or afflictions when they actually arrive. But the prayer in Gethsemane shows that the preceding anxiety is equally God’s will and equally part of our human destiny. The perfect Man experienced it. And the servant is not greater than the master. We are Christians, not Stoics.

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labour is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake.

That last quote of Lewis’s is a real zinger for me. It will be my prayer as I take my walks and write this blog. Let me attend, come awake, and remain awake to God’s incognito presence in this world!

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

In December I read a charming little book called The Gnome Project by Jessica Peill-Meininghaus about how she decided to cure her lifelong habit of not completing projects by making one gnome every day for a year. No matter what! I wish I could tell you that I’ve decided to do the same thing ( I love gnomes!!), but I wouldn’t know where to start. Let the Peill-Meininghauses of this world handle that. However, I got to thinking that it might be a good discipline for me to do just one thing consistently every day for a year. So I picked going for a walk, taking photos, and blogging. Okay, that’s three things.

Today was another one of those so-cold-outside-and-the-wind-is-howling days that make it hard to keep up with this resolve. I enjoy being sedentary. And warm. Sedentary warmth is my happy place (I’d like to see that on an inspirational poster!). Dear reader, I went anyway.

Every day when I’ve been outside I see something worth capturing, something worth seeing and thinking about, something simple and beautiful. When I bring the camera and lift it to my eyes, it’s as if everything around me is shouting “Me! Pick me!”

I didn’t bring my camera today (I took the above shot right outside our back door). Too cold. But you can still see and hear what it was like:

The rhythmic “squeak, squeak, squeak” of my boots on the hard snow.
A lone tree in a snow-swept field holding down the fort.
Clouds scudding across the sky,
occasionally stepping aside to reveal a pale, impotent sun,
which, unlike its summer counterpart, I can stare at all I want
without burning my retinas.
Men out with their snow blowers, creating even more snow flurries.
Empty roads, lively winds, a moving veil of snow everywhere,
Heading back, pushing against the wind which feels prickly on my skin,
And the rhythmic “squeak, squeak, squeak” of my boots going up the driveway.

In honor of our winter storm, I want to share this delightful poem by Mary Oliver that I read the other day.

The Storm
Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters.
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.

Oh, I could not have said it better myself.

Indeed!

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

Here’s how we look in Minnesota when we venture outdoors on a snowy, cold day:

If it were below zero, that would be way too much exposed skin. Cocooned like that, all you hear while you are walking is the sound of your own heavy breathing. The rest of the world is muffled and curtained; you can make up your own narrative as you go along, unfettered by the regular noises and distractions of the world. It is a wintry dream that holds you captive and sets a snowy filter over your eyes. It is a time to ponder the God who releases all of this from His vault and sends it with glorious extravagance. The trees hold out their branches and rejoice.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

Let’s tell an inside story today. Behold, our “fireplace:”

I read a something in the Voice of the Martyrs magazine yesterday morning that has lingered with me in a powerful way. Gather around the “fireplace” with me while I tell you about it.

A man in Ethiopia became a sheikh. He had a zeal for Islam and an equally passionate hatred for Christians. This is all he knew, all he’d been taught. He said, “Ever since I was a young man, I wanted to persecute and even kill Christians. When I became a sheikh, it was my greatest priority.” Sound like anyone you know? If you’ve read the story of the apostle Paul in the Bible, you will recognize that he had that same unholy zeal, thinking that his persecution of the newborn Christian church was pleasing to God. His awakening came on the road to Damascus. But back to the sheikh, our modern Paul.

He went from village to village, leading groups of hotheads like himself. They sought out the Christians in those villages and burned their houses and burned their churches. And then this happened:

“One day we went to another village to burn the house of a Christian lady. I dragged the lady from her house. I beat her. I hit her so hard that I broke her arm. She began crying from the pain, but rather than curse me or yell at me, she said, ‘God bless you, my brother.’

“I was shocked. My heart was broken, and I cried for two nights. God had crushed me.”

He broke her arm, and God broke his heart. He was on the road to Damascus, my friends. He began to have dreams of Jesus and soon left Islam to follow Christ. And his former friends came and burned his house. Like Paul, he suffered the loss of all things, and counted them rubbish because he had gained Christ.

The beauty of that woman blessing her persecutor was as the beauty of the crucifixion when Jesus blessed those who nailed Him to the cross. She gave her pain to Christ and He redeemed it with a sheikh who truly became her brother.

I think back to when God crushed me, although not in quite so dramatic a manner. In the end, God must crush us in order to save us. And He will redeem what we have lost. He will take our pain and use it for His kingdom.

And we’ll live happily ever after. That’s how all good stories should end.

God bless you, my brother, my sister.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

It was 5 degrees and late afternoon by the time I was heading home from work. I wished I hadn’t committed to taking a walk every day in 2020, but there’s not much point in making a commitment if you abandon it at the first sign of inconvenience or discomfort. I’m not taking my camera with me, I thought – too cold. No outdoor photos today. And then I saw it in the sky – a sun dog! Sun dogs are God’s gift to us in the Northern Lands, much like the northern lights (which I’ve actually never seen). Here’s the scientific explanation:

“The sun dog is a member of the family of halos, caused by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the atmosphere. Sun dogs typically appear as a pair of subtly colored patches of light, around 22 degrees to the left and right of the sun…”

Scientists take the fun out of everything. Here’s my explanation:

Sun dogs are rainbow pillars that flank the sun with rare beauty and can only be seen when the days are so cold that your eyelashes freeze.

I guess they can be seen anywhere in any season, but they’re most obvious in really cold weather and when the sun is close to the horizon.

I actually drove to a spot to get a good shot and then went home and took my walk without the camera. The sun dog was way more beautiful in person than in this photo.

Sun Dog Days
Will you dare to catch a sun dog?
Will you run to grab his ears?
His bark is fearsome frost,
His eyes like dreadful mirrors.
Oh, you’ll never, never tame him –
Just when you think he’s yours,
He’ll sink into the shadows
With icy growls and roars.

That about does it for today. I’ll probably delete this in the morning.