• Beauty,  Life,  Reading

    Finding God in the Waves | Book Review

    Science doesn’t ask you for faith. It’s happy to show you it’s homework. At the end of the day, we want to be alive. Everything we do is an attempt to live. We want the best of what our time on Earth can offer us. This is a part of our humanity; survival is not merely for survival’s sake. We do more than survive and this is an ancient drive. We want to know why we’re here and we want being here to matter. For those of us born into a faith tradition, those deep existential quandaries always had pat answers. I learned as a small child that my presence is purposeful and that I…

  • Christian Living,  creativity,  God,  Reading,  Worship

    Wilting Well

    The roses wilt and I let them stay here, dying in the dingy vase by the winter-dirtied window. They sit on the food-stained tablecloth in the kitchen I have nested into comfortable beauty – it’s home with dirt and all. Because roses die lovely and I catch them in my quotidian busy, find in them a small sabbath while I labor. May I die lovely, too. In the dingy vase of this imperfect life – full of pain and aches of still-not-getting-it, full of disasters most unnatural, winters that make my lenses foggy, too. When I miss the beauty in decomposing – didn’t he say he made all things new?…

  • Jesus Christ,  Love,  Reading,  Richard Wurmbrand,  Worship

    “My love is mad, without motive, as Your love is, too.”

    This is a Romanian poem, translated to English by the author, a preacher who was imprisoned during the communist rule in Romania. He describes the time of authorship as a time when he felt Satan’s presence in his cell. After being kidnapped, kept away from his wife and son who had no idea where he was, tortured to recant his faith, with no end in sight, he wrestled with doubt and accusations against Christ. He felt abandoned by God and taunted by Satan. He wrote this poem (it doesn’t look like a poem in translation, but it is) and found peace. From childhood I frequented temples and churches. In them…