May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
March 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
April 2007
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007
October 2007
November 2007
December 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
July 2008
August 2008
November 2008
December 2008
January 2009
April 2009
May 2009
June 2009
July 2009
August 2009
October 2009
December 2009
January 2010
February 2010
March 2010
April 2010
May 2010
June 2010
August 2010
September 2010


Thank you mellyjelly/drumthings for this fantabulous skin=D

Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world."

Our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup. Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like the flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections — sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent — that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life.

So there are cakes and pillows and colours galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wild rollercoaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.

Love cares more for others than for self.

Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.

Love doesn't strut,

Doesn't have a swelled head,

Doesn't force itself on others,

Isn't always "me first,"

Doesn't fly off the handle,

Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,

Doesn't revel when others grovel,

Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,

Puts up with anything,

Trusts God always,

Always looks for the best,

Never looks back,

But keeps going to the end.

Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

1 Corinthians 13:1-10 (MSG)

Vision Sunday 2010 from Hillsong Church on Vimeo.

Here is Love

Here is love, vast as the ocean
Lovingkindness as the flood
When the Prince of Life, our Ransom
Shed for us His precious blood
Who His love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He can never be forgotten
Throughout Heav'n's eternal days

On the mount of crucifixion
Fountains opened deep and wide
Through the floodgates of God's mercy
Flowed a vast a gracious tide
Grace and love, like mighty rivers
Poured incessant from above
And Heav'n's peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in love

Chorus:
No love is higher, no love is wider
No love is deeper, no love is truer
No love is higher, no love is wider
No love is like Your love, o Lord

And he left, knowing that he now had the reason to never go back, to never see her again, and to finally get her out of his blood, and out of his life. In the end it was so obvious. He should have expected it all along.

A new man. Of course. What else?

He wondered how he could ever have been so dumb, how he could ever have believed that she was really any different to him. She was just another girl. She was just another woman. How could it possibly end any other way? She had met some new guy. Right. Of course. He almost laughed. But somehow the banality of it all was impossible to grasp.

A new man, when she had told him that there would never be another man, and that she would love him until the day she died. All that stuff that they put in the songs. All the lies they tell you and you are so eager to believe.

Only you, for ever and ever, like one of the old songs. That's what she had told him, that's what had come out of the mouth he knew so well, and he had believed her, and it made his life impossible because it meant he could never give her up. It meant that one day and someday and somehow they would be together, because there was no escaping the other. They were bound together like two mountaineers. But now she had broken the bond.

He had been told that they did not feel love in the way that he felt love, that they responded to acts of kindness and generosity with all their body and heart, but that was not love, they told him, not in the Western sense of the one true one, the partner for life, the unmet lover found at last. Not love like that, like love back home, the way that it was meant to be, they said. Not real love the way it was made in the West.

They were just so practical when it came to love, they told him until he believed it, until he could see what they meant, and he could see that we in the West were not practical at all - we simply fell, we just took the giddy step over the cliff and landed where our wayward hearts took us.

The East was practical. The East could not afford to love. The West was romantic. Because the West could afford to love.

And perhaps she said it because she felt it too - the terrible finality of the ending, of letting it go, and she wanted him to stay for just a few more seconds, because they both knew they would never see each other again after today, and all they would ever share now was the past and whatever photographs that she had been unable to destroy.

My Favourite Wife by Tony Parsons

But when one of them goes - when one of them walks out - then you feel so worthless. You just feel so worthless, and I don't think you every get over it. I think a part of you always feels worthless, as if you deserved it, as if you made it happen, as if it happened because you were bad.

He had thought on their wedding day that the rings they exchanged would last them a lifetime. Now he saw that wedding rings get lost, they get stolen, they get thrown in anger. Now he saw that you might get through any number of wedding rings in a marriage. Now he found it difficult that he had never been as young as he was on their wedding day, young enough to believe that you only need one wedding ring.

Was it over?

Not until he could harden his heart and stop seeing her, not until she stopped loving him as if there was something special about him, not until she stopped loving him as if he was a good man.

Not until she stopped loving him all the time. Not until he knew that she would be just fine without him. Not until he could think about what was going to happen to her without being worried sick.

It would never over until then.

They didn't say 'I love you' very often. They were not one of those married couples that felt the need to say it every day. But it came out when they realised what they had, and they were grateful, and they were wise enough to count their blessings.

Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour for others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men.

What if the problem was not trying to meet someone great, but that you would meet a lot of great people? What if the problem was not finding someone worthy of love, but meeting an endless number of people who were worthy of love? What then? Was that a blueprint for a happy life? Or a recipe for disaster?

When he kissed her it was a good fit. In fact their mouths fit together perfectly. There was usually something wrong with the way mouths fit together, he thought. Tongues too active or passive, lips too hard or wet, teeth that got in the way. Noses all over the place. But not with her.

His parents had made it look easy. You find someone and then you stick with them forsaking all others until you are parted by the grave. You kept all the big promises you had made in bed an in church and on all the days you would never forget. That's what you did, and your life was simple, and the future was clear. It did not seem impossible, unimaginable.

If it's possible for me to come back and be around you, then that's exactly what I am going to do, and I'll be there for ever. Everywhere you go. You'll be all grown up but I'll still be there. I'll be in the sunlight on your face, and I'll be in rain on your shoes, and I'll be in the wind in your hair. I'll be there when you wake up in the morning and I'll be there when you go to sleep at night. And I'll keep watch by your bed all night, and you will feel me smiling and you, and you'll never be alone because I will be there, always and forever.

Too many people loved the old man to let him die alone. But the old man had his own family behind him, the brothers who were still alive, and the widows of the ones who were not, and Bill saw that there were many people who loved the old man because of who he was, and without the obligation of blood. They all came, and there was a sad grandeur to these final days in the hospital, as if all the friends and neighbours and work mates of a lifetime had to be gathered here, in this special place, to show they cared and to say goodbye.

My Favourite Wife by Tony Parsons