Tag Archives: Day

233. The day is of infinite length for him who knows how to appreciate and use it. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Take time to think; it is the source of power.
Take time to play; it the secret of perpetual youth.
Take time to read; it is the fountain of wisdom.
Take time to pray; it is the greatest power on earth.
Take time to love and be loved; it is a God-given privilege.
Take time to be friendly; it is the road to happiness.
Take time to laugh; it is the music of the soul.
Take time to give; it is too short a day to be selfish.
Take time to be charitable; it is the key to heaven.
~Author Unknown

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; …  ~Ecclesiastes 3:8  ✝

221. Breath of heaven, lighten my darkness, pour over me your holiness. for you are holy. ~Amy Grant

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Loving God, help us remember the birth of Jesus,
that we may share in the song of the angels,
the gladness of the shepherds,
and worship of the wise men.

Close the door of hate
and open the door of love all over the world.
Let kindness come with every gift and good desires with every greeting.
Deliver us from evil by the blessing which Christ brings,
and teach us to be merry with clear hearts.

May the Christmas morning make us happy to be thy children,
and Christmas evening bring us to our beds with grateful thoughts,
forgiving and forgiven, for Jesus’ sake.  Amen.

~Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish novelist and poet

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He has no car, no address, no phone number.  He has no money in his pocket; he doesn’t know from where his next meal will come; and more than likely he knows not where he’ll lay his head to sleep tonight or any other night for that matter.

I know not his name nor where he’s from nor where he is now.  Neither do I have any idea what trials lead this man in the photo to the harsh realities of the streets where he currently exists, but I do know in whose image he is made and to whom he belongs.  And I know that if there is to be any kind of joy in his world or peace in our silent nights, it will happen only with help from those of us who are part of Christ’s body.

In the Father’s eyes this man’s worth is no less than that of any other man, and the story that’s in his eyes is deserving of compassionate ears.  So I pause tonight to pray for this man and those like him.  I pray that all of them find food and shelter as well as a good measure of comfort and peace.  And for my family and you who are reading this, I pray that you all have a most blessed Christmas and a very happy New Year.  “O, come let us adore Him” for He came to save us all.

Grant me the grace of inner sight this day
that I may see you as the Self within all selves.
Grant me the grace of love this day
that amidst the pain and disfigurement of life
I may find the treasure that is unlocked by love,
that amidst the pain and disfigurement of my own life
I may know the richness that lies buried in the human soul.
~J. Philip Newell

How priceless is your unfailing love!  Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings.  ~Psalm 36:7   ✝

*The photograph of this homeless man was sent out in an enews bulletin from a local church.

194. Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul. ~Plato

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No one knew the name of this day;
Born quietly from deepest night,
It hid its face in light,
Demanding nothing for itself,
Opened out to offer each of us
A field of brightness that traveled ahead,
Providing in time, ground to hold our footsteps
And the light of thought to show the way.
~John O’Donohoe, Irish poet and philosopher

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Watching the seasons pass over my little piece of Eden brings a feeling of rightness to my days.  Whenever I take time to sit outside for a while even this late in the year, there inevitably comes a comfortable feeling of harmony between the rhythms of my body and the rhythms of the earth.  When restless and unable to sleep at night, I sometimes sit inside in my recliner peering out the big patio windows seeking God’s face and listening for His voice.  In the enveloping peace of the night’s darkness and with a feeling of rhythmic harmony again resonating within me, a vivid image of Christ often comes to the foreground of my thoughts.  The awareness of the Holy One’s presence restores my sense of oneness with Him and Creation, and so I rest, assured that all is well and as it should be.  I know the nameless day hiding in the deep of night will be yet another gift from Him intended for His use and purposes, and I will be given the needed strength and guidance to face it.

It is God who arms me with strength and keeps my way secure.  ~2 Samuel 22:23  ✝

191. Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night; and thus he would never know the rhythms that are at the heart of life. ~Hal Borland

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The hush comes with the deepening of Autumn;
but it comes gradually.
Our ears are attuned to it, day by quieter day.
But even now, if one awakens in the deep darkness
of the small hours, one can hear it;
a foretaste of Winter silence.
~Hal Borland

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One day recently as we pulled out of the garage to go to lunch, we saw this, the clearly  defined, back edge of a line of thunderstorms.  While I was taking shots of the scene, it occurred to me that in a much slower progression that’s the way all of nature’s phenomena pass over the earth during the course of a year.  Sunny days come and go, hot and cold periods come and go, flowers come and go, fruitings and harvests come and go–in other words the Lord’s good provisions are always in a never-ending flux of comings and goings.  Autumn then, as Hal Borland suggests in another excerpt, is indeed a summing up of what’s happened throughout a year’s trip around the sun, and thankfully it only takes away what the gardener holds dear a little bit at a time.  We may not be too many steps away from winter, but given earth’s history of unfailing continuance neither are we too many steps away from spring.  So to recall an old familiar adage, all’s well that ends well, and autumn does indeed end a year splendidly well.

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good.  His love endures forever.   ~Psalm 135:1   ✝

183. Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? ~Walt Whitman

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And this our life,
exempt from public haunt,
finds tongues in trees,
books in running brooks,
sermons in stones,
and good in everything.
~William Shakespeare

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Standing beneath the Shumard Red Oak made me feel like I was standing in a temple of the Most High.  The breeze was ruffling its leaves, and they in turn were prompting sacred tongues to utter incantations of their divine purpose.  For though the leaves face eminent extinction and expulsion from the branches, in their dying they’ll fall and create warm blankets to cover the ground.  In so doing they will protect the life that lies beneath the surface during winter’s cold, cold days.  Even at the close of winter their goodness will not be at an end for as they deteriorate, the remaining bits and pieces will add nutrients to enhance the soil.  Thus goes the circle of life and the interdependency of all things.

God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways; He does great things beyond our understanding.  ~Job 37:5  ✝

166. Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning…. ~Wallace Stegner

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The foliage had been losing its freshness through the month of August,
and here and there a yellow leaf showed itself like a first gray hair…
September dressed herself in showy dahlias and
splendid marigolds and starry zinnias.
October, the extravagant sister, ordered an immense amount of
the most gorgeous forest tapestry to make glorious her grand spectacle.
~Edited and adapted excerpt from Oliver Wendell Holmes

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The first leafy sign of autumn appeared on the Dogwood today, and it triggered a flood of “color” musings in my mind.  Chestnut and chocolate!  What’s not to love about a season that clears off summer’s calamities, piles delectable hues back on nature’s palette, and calls for a pot of hot chocolate?  Lemon and lime!  Grasses, flowers, fruits, berries, and even a beastie or two weave fabulous garlands in the sacred temple bound by earth and sky.  Maroon and mahogany!  Chilling winds induce chemical changes in leaves that conjure up magic shows on woody altars in earth’s forests.  Mauve and mulberry!  The leaves on maples, oaks, dogwoods, pears, persimmons, and other trees give birth to colorful, parchment-like jewels that will one day snap off, swirl in little eddies, and play like children upon the ground.  Orange and ochre!  Pumpkins made to squat on porches or bales of hay tickle the fancy of mortal tongues anxiously awaiting fall feasts and winter banquets.  Red and russet!  Roses, asters, and Maximilian sunflowers invoke a breath of spring not stifled by summer’s heat to keep the year’s last child in colorful array.  Sable and sapphire!  Skies often shrouded by gauzy, gray clouds are swept clear by northerly winds as cold fronts advance.  On such days a spectacular brilliance can be seen on the brows of morn followed by daylight hours drenched in deep, dreamy shades of blue.  Sterling and pewter!  Plumed grasses shift and sigh in authorship of haunting, autumnal hymns.  Ah, how lovely are the many colors of autumn and the Holy One who made them!

As long as earth endures, seedtime and harvest (spring and autumn), cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.  ~Genesis 8:22  ✝

156. I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning. ~J. B. Priestley

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I do believe in an everyday sort of magic–
the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience
with places, people, works of art and the like;
the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity;
the whispered voice, the hidden presence,
when we think we’re alone.
~Charles de Lint

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Rose Fyleman (1877-1957) was an English writer and poet of exceptional talent who was best known for her works on the “fairy folk” for children.  She also translated many rare children’s books from French and German into their first English translations.  She eventually became the editor of one of the first children’s magazines called The Merry Go Round.  Rose was born in Nottingham, England, and there is speculation that it could have been the magical setting of Nottingham which led her to believe in fairies.  Whatever the reason, she blessed generations of readers with her lovely fairy poems.

It was one of Rose’s poem, Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden, which prompted my post last night about toadstools.  I loved her poetry as a child and I love it still.  I am passionate about gardening and its lore, and when I see creatures like the one in my photo I see how easy it would be to invent stories about “fairies.”  Besides what he said above, Charles de Lint, explained childhood this way:  “It is easy to believe in magic when you’re young.  Anything you couldn’t explain was magic then.  It didn’t matter if it was science or a fairy tale.  Electricity and elves were both infinitely mysterious and equally possible — elves probably more so.”  I believe Creation is both miracle and magic, and the more we try to explain it the more we see how miraculous and magical it is.  R. A. Salvatore said “a world without mystery is a world without faith,” and so it is because it is our faith that tells us what magic is “waiting somewhere behind the morning” and whose is the “whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.”

There are fairies at the bottom of the garden!
It’s not so very, very far away;
You pass the gardener’s shed and you just keep straight ahead.
I do so hope they’ve really come to stay. . .
~for more of Fyleman’s work go to:  http://www.fairyamber.com/rfyleman.html

By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king’s anger: he persevered because he saw Him who is invisible.  ~Hebrews 11:27

137. Silence is the universal refuge…a balm to our every chagrin. ~Henry David Thoreau

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Soon silence will have passed into legend.
Man has turned his back on silence.
Day after day he invents machines and devices
that increase noise and distract humanity
from the essence of life. . .
~Jean Arp, French sculptor, painter, and poet

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We see patterns of stillness and silence in the natural world.  Day gives way to night, fruitfulness gives way to fallowness, bodies give way to fatigue.  However, in today’s noisy culture, there exists an almost obsessive tendency toward unending busyness.  Rest and yielding to silence has for many become a forgotten art or at best difficult.  But on days like today, in the midst of the noise a profound silence can be found in rain, and in that silence some seem still to be able to hear the slowing voice of quietude.  And I find that if one takes time to sit, listen, and watch the rain, an ancient holy voice has a way of pulling him/her into a deep peacefulness.  What’s more if the listener seeks a way to come back again and again to that quiet place, an intimate relationship begins to form.  Mother Teresa once said, “We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness.  God is the friend of silence.  See how nature – trees, flowers, grass – grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. . .We need silence to be able to touch souls.”

“Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”  -Psalm 46:10    ✝

120. Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message. ~Malcolm Muggeridge

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The world has different owners at sunrise. . .
Even your own garden does not belong to you.
Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns;
a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime
patrols the brick walls,
and a golden-tailed pheasant
glints his way through the iris spears.
~Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
pioneering American aviator and author

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In my yard are squirrels instead of rabbits, mockingbirds instead of blackbirds, an assortment of stray cats instead of one tortoise-shell cat, and garter snakes that slither through the grass instead of a pheasant that glints his way through the iris spear.  So it is that my yard has as Lindbergh penned “different owners at sunrise.”  But since I planted everything for the wildlife as much as for me, why shouldn’t they come and sometimes in large numbers all through the day and night.

J. Philip Newell says that God’s glory glows “in the glistening of a creature’s eyes” as well as in “every emanation of creation’s life,” and that we can reverence God “in all that has life.”  My guess is that’s why some people garden in the first place.  We are fascinated by and delighted with the flowers and the wildlife, but we long for the presence of God into our green temples–that Presence that we feel and see in tiny buds breaking the soil, in pinkish purply glows in the eastern sky, in a silver slivers of the moon in the darkness of night, or in the delicious stillnesses in the garden as day passes into night.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. . .  ~Romans 1:20   ✝

72. Come, fill the Cup, . . . the Bird of time has but a little way to fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the wing. ~Omar Khayyám

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The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
~Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyám, 11th century Persian poet

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In my twenties, I came face to face with the reality of what this Persian poet articulated in the Rubaiyat, but thankfully in my thirties I also realized that every spring all that God created begins again.  So even though I have no a chance to do anything about the past, in the season of restoration and rebirth God built into the fabric of Creation, I can forge on with writing new stories and/or penning different endings to ones not yet finished.  However, lest I get too comfortable in dalliances a long the way and to show how quickly what the poem’s author revealed can come about, I must remember that a new year’s garden progeny and its days come and go quickly, and when done they are never, as Khayyám said, to be lured back nor washed away by tears.  So with every spending of my time coins, I must seize opportunities opening to blushes of newness.  Scripture may tell the world that the “birthing and restoring” of new years will go on “as long as earth endures,” but last November’s brush with death taught me to make the most of each day and not rely on what I, myself, may not be given.

The best things in life are nearest:
Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet,
duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.
Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain, common work as it comes,
certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.
~Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish poet

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”  ~Genesis 8:22   ✝