Monthly Archives: December 2015

1006. My beloved is mine and I am His… ~Excerpt from Song of Songs 2:16 ✝

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Wilt thou love God, as he thee? Then digest,
My Soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by Angels waited on
In heaven, doth make His Temple in thy breast.
~Excerpt from the Holy Sonnet XV
by John Donne

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Christianity is a love story. It is about love lost at Eden and love restored at Calvary. We alone out of all creation were made not mere to serve God but to love Him and be loved by Him. It was not the angels and archangels whom He made for love; He made them for ministry (Hebrews 1:14); He made us for intimacy (v. 13: Ephesians 2:6).

The heart of God, the desire of God, the greatest command of God, is not about obedience, not about worship, not about service, not about study, but about love–loving God with everything we have, even as He loves us with everything He has. But, sadly, we have often replaced love with law, intimacy with theology, delight in God with duty to God, being found with God with being sound about God. Our speech about God has the cold sterility of the scientist rather than the thrill of the poet. We have interpreted texts, but we have somehow failed to experience the reality behind them. The Holy Spirit today and always is calling His church back to intimacy with Jesus. ~These are passages from Chapter 2 of a Kindle Book, MORE, written by Rev. Simon Ponsonby, at St. Aldates in Oxford, UK.

Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. ~Deuteronomy 6:5  ✝
Jesus replied,“Love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.” ~Matthew 22:37  ✝
He(Jesus) answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ~Luke 10:27  ✝
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” ~Mark 12:30-31  ✝

**As we draw closer to Christmas and ready hearts to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, I thought this was a particularly good excerpt to read and “digest.” I pray that Rev. Ponsonby doesn’t mind my sharing this portion of his book.

**Image found on Pinterest

1005. Over everything connected with autumn there lingers some golden spell—some unseen influence that penetrates the soul with its mysterious power. ~Northern Advocate

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In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year,
bringing us the fruition of months of thought and care and toil.
~Rose G. Kingsley

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Leaf by leaf and petal by petal, the garden unravels more and more each day. And with every wind that blows, be it from the north, the south, the east, or the west, little eddies of leaf litter now blow about dancing like bits of confetti. Too can be seen the first skeletons of trees and shrubs laid bare by the blustery winds and recent downpours. Yet the temperatures have remained mildish and so amid the decay are, even as the sands in late autumn’s hourglass run out, “honey’d leavings” and faint renditions of fall’s “lusty song.” However, soon and like all things, the last season of the year will come to its Sabbath and therefore have to rest until its next appointed hours.

What prodigious phenomenons are the seasons of the year! How carefully planned! What attention to detail they are given! Even in places where there are no robust seasonal changes, one is able to discern the Divine’s purpose. No matter when or where one is, there is a discernible rhythm to the seasonal harmonies in the cosmic book of days. And in the rhythms are a sacred and perceptible heartbeat, a heartbeat that if sought and listened to is as recognizable as that of a mother’s to her infant. For it is the beating heart of God, and His comforting eternal echo of the spheres can be heard in every corner of the universe. Like gravity the sound of it holds hearers in its grasp, and in the hearing comes the longing to see the face of the Holy One whose heart holds us, His children, with a love bigger than the universe itself.

Even the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons and the dove, the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration. ~Except from Jeremiah 8:7  ✝

**I love this capture I got of the red oak leaf that became wedged in the latch on my greenhouse door during yesterday’s high winds.

More than

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Julie (aka Cookie)'s avatarcookiecrumbstoliveby

“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
― Augustine of Hippo

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts,
there can be no more hurt, only more love.
Mother Teresa

“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The harder the conflict,
the more glorious the triumph.”
Thomas Paine

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(remnants of Cong Abbey , County Mayo, Ireland / Julie Cook / 2015)

It whispers across a cool morning breeze…

Do you hear it?

It’s the sound of a thousand and one voices drifting endlessly across the ages.
It’s the mournful cry of a dove at dawn.
It’s the melodic symphony of an unseen…

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1004. Prayer is exhaling the spirit of man and inhaling the spirit of God. ~Edwin Keith

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I believe in God, and that there are pieces of him, called love and goodness, in everyone. I also believe in prayer, not the memorized type mumbled in church but the spontaneous kind spoken, ironically, in the last breath of the day, when the lamp has been dimmed and the bedspread drawn down, and it’s just you and those pieces of God in you, alone…. I suspect that when a man grows too big to kneel, then he is destined to fall. ~Joe Kita

By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me— a prayer to the God of my life. ~Psalm 42:8  ✝

**The image is of monarda that grew in garden last summer.

a thousand stars

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Julie (aka Cookie)'s avatarcookiecrumbstoliveby

O Father may that Holy Star Grow every year more bright,
And send its glorious beams afar to fill the world with light.
-William Cullen Bryant

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(star sunflowers / Sleive League, County Donegal, Ireland / Julie Cook / 2015)

Each evening during the season of Advent, as the sun sinks just beyond the horizon, watchful eyes lift skyward scanning the heavens eastward for a single star which shines brighter than the rest.

A sign
A signal
A symbol

As the Christian faithful gather together,
anxiously watching and waiting for direction.

A command
A compass
A course

Open questions now beg to be answered…
Where shall we go?
What are we to find?
What are we to do?

And as those questions skip across the nighttime breeze,
an unseen Hand scatters a thousand stars across a dark December sky…

To seek
To search
To share

To find
To forgive
To free

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