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Thursday, September 16, 2010
A Beautiful Exchange

You were near
Though I was distant
Disillusioned I was
Lost and insecure

Still mercy fought
For my attention
You were waiting at the door
Then I let you in

Trading your life
For my offenses
For my redemption
You carried all the blame

Breaking the curse
Of our condition
Perfection took our place

Chorus:
When only love could make a way
You gave your life in a beautiful exchange

My burden erased
My life forgiven
There is nothing that could take this love away
And my only desire and sole ambition
Is to love you just the same

Chorus:
When only love could make a way
You gave your life in a beautiful exchange
When only love could break these chains
You gave your life in a beautiful exchange


Bridge:
Holy are you God
Holy is your name
With everything I’ve got
My heart will sing how I love you


Greatness of our God


Verse 1:
Give me eyes to see
More of who You are
May what I behold,
still my anxious heart.
Take what I have known
And break it all apart
For You my God, are greater still.

CHORUS
No sky contains,
No doubt restrains,
All You are,
The greatness of our God.
I spend my life to know,
And I'm far from close
To all You are,
The greatness of our God.

Verse 2:
Give me grace to see
Beyond this moment here.
To believe that there
Is nothing left to fear.

That You alone are high above it all.
For You my God, are greater still.

CHORUS 2x
No sky contains,
No doubt restrains,
All You are,
The greatness of our God.
I spend my life to know,
And I'm far from close
To all You are,
The greatness of our God.

Brigde: 2x
And there is nothing
That can ever separate us.
There is nothing that can ever
separate us from Your love.
No life, no death, of this I am convinced.
You my God, are greater still.

2x:
And no words can say, or song convey,
all You are the greatness of our God.
I spend my life to know,
And I'm far from close
to all You are,
the greatness of our God.

1:02 AMsent a prayer


Because I always think that it is bizarre - no, I always think it is unbelievable - that you can love someone, really and truly love someone, and then one day you do not recognise their face.

If you loved someone, you would think that you would know that face always and forever - wouldn't you? Shouldn't every line of that face be stamped on your heart?

But it is not. Your heart forgets.



A white plane with a red tail was taxiing towards us. As it headed for the runway I could read the words on the side. Qantas - Spirit of Australia, it said. There was a slash of white on the red tail, and when it got closer it revealed itself as the silhouette of a kangaroo that was as sleek as a greyhound.

The plane turned, moving parallel to the observation deck for a minute, no more, as it pushed out to join the other planes that were lining up for the runway. And then I found myself walking by the glass wall of the observation deck, keeping up with the plane at first, and then seeing it pulling away from me, and starting to run. I said his name one last time, my hands pressed against the glass. And I watched him go.

Men from the Boys by Tony Parsons

12:50 AMsent a prayer

Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Loving her was a little like taking the same seat day after day on a commuter train - you couldn't imagine how it might feel to be in the row behind, you could swear that the dimensions and hollows of the seat were made just for you, you come back to it repeatedly with a whoosh of comfort and relief that it was still available.

Mercy by Jodi Picoult
5:06 AMsent a prayer

Sunday, August 08, 2010

3974908298_f4ecb1c198.jpg


Being adopted felt like reading a book that had the first chapter ripped out. You might be enjoying the plot and the characters, but you’d probably also like to read the first line, too. However, when you took the book back to the store to say that the first chapter was missing, they told you they couldn’t sell you a replacement copy that was intact. What if you read that first chapter and realised you hated the book, and posted a nasty review on Amazon? What if you hurt the author’s feelings? Better just to stick with your partial copy and enjoy the rest of the story.

I wondered about the explorers who’d sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who’d sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who’d cried with me over boyfriends, who’d clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realised. Being a parent wasn’t just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

Choices are funny things – ask a native tribe that’s eaten grubs and roots forever if they’re unhappy, and they’ll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don’t know there’s an alternative, you can’t miss it.

Besides the obvious difference, there was not much distinction between losing a best friend and losing a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumphs and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside. One moment, you’d start to call her to tell her a snippet of news or to vent about your awful day before realising you did not have that right anymore; the next, you could not remember the digits of her phone number.

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I think you can love a person too much.

You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was...

...Parents aren't the people you come from. They're the people you want to be, when you grow up.

People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little bit more.

But love wasn’t about sacrifice, and it wasn’t about falling short of someone’s expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them. All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else’s life would not have been as rich without us here.


Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult

11:00 PMsent a prayer

Saturday, June 26, 2010

How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.

Up In The Air

---------------------------

I love you, and when you love someone, you do things for them without complaining about it.


Nobody looks into the face of a newborn son and imagines all the things that will go wrong in his life. Instead, you see nothing but possibility.


Sometimes the hardest thing to hear is the truth.


In reality, you don’t ever change the hurricane. You just learn how to stay out of its path.


Instead of dreaming of a miracle, you learn to make your own.


The brain of a person in love doesn’t look like the brain of someone overcome by deep emotion. It looks like the brain of a person who’s been snorting coke.


So much time is spent with people superficially. You remember all the fun you had but nothing specific.


When you expect something, you’re sure to be disappointed. I learned that a long time ago.


Don’t you wish love was so strong it could come back to haunt you?


Logical thinking keeps you from wasting your time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen.


Numbers make sense. You cannot say the same about people.


The division between an observer and a participant is nearly invisible; you can cross it before you even know you’ve stepped over the line.


If you ever find yourself arguing with a woman, try kissing her to throw her off her guard. If you are in the middle of a battle and your buddy is shot, friendship means you have to go back under fire to rescue him.


I am the first person to tell you that I do not understand love. How can you love your new haircut, love your new job, and love your girlfriend all at once? Clearly the word doesn’t mean the same thing in different situations, which is why I have never been able to figure it out with logic.


Dead isn’t angels or ghosts. It’s a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body so that they can return to their most elemental stage. I don’t really see why that freaks people out, since it’s the most natural cycle in the world.


Living with regrets is like driving a car that only moves in reverse.


People don’t just disappear. There’s always a reason, or an enemy with a grudge. There’s always a loose thread that starts to unravel.


Parenting isn’t a noun but a verb- an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is always flat.


There’s no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn’t nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would leave you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren’t proud of.


Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I’m living will never really fit.

Sometimes I think the human heart is just a simple shelf. There’s only so much you can pile onto it before something falls off an edge and you are left to pick up the pieces.


You might be able to sense that a catastrophe is imminent; you might feel the faintest mist on your face. But even when you see that wall of water rushing towards you, you know you are powerless to budge an inch.


When you find the person you’re supposed to love, bells ring and fireworks go off in your head and you can’t find the words to speak and you think about her all the time. When you find the person you are supposed to love, you will know by staring deeply into her eyes.


House Rules by Jodi Picoult
6:06 PMsent a prayer

Saturday, May 08, 2010

Which fundamentals will lead their believers to be the most loving and receptive to those with whom they differ? Which set of unavoidably exclusive beliefs will lead us to humble, peace-loving behaviour?

Why would such an exclusive belief system lead to behaviour that was so open to others? It was because Christians had within their belief system the strongest possible resource for practising sacrificial service, generosity and peace-making. At the very heart of their view of reality was a man who died for his enemies, praying for their forgiveness. Relfection on this could only lead to a radically different way of dealing with those who were different from them. It meant they could not act in violence and oppression toward their opponents.

It is not a religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life. That is metanoia [repenteance]: not in the first place thinking about one's own needs, problems, sins and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ ... Pain is a holy angel. Through him men have become greater than through all the joys of the world ... The pain of longing, which often can be felt physically, must be there, and we shall not and need not talk it away. But it needs to be overcome every time, and thus there is an even holier angel than the one of pain, that is the one of joy in God.

Imagine trying to look directly at the sun in order to learn about it. You can't do it. It will burn out your retinas, ruining your capacity to take it in. A far better way to learn about the existence, power and quality of the sun is to look at the world it shows you, to recognise how it sustains everything you see and enables you to see it.

We should not try to 'look into the sun', as it were, demanding irrefutable proofs for God. Instead we should 'look what the sun shows us.' Which account of the world has the most 'explanatory power' to make sense of what we see in the world and in ourselves? We have a sense that the world is not the way it ought to be. We have a sense that we are very flawed and yet very great. We have a longing for love and beauty that nothing in this world can fulfill. We have a deep need to know meaning and purpose. Which worldview best accounts for these things?

Christians do not claim that their faith gives them omniscience or absolute knowledge of reality. Only God has that. But they believe that the Christian account of things – creation, fall, redemption and restoration – makes the most sense of the world.

If the God of the Bible exists, he is not the man in the attic, but the Playwright. That means we won't be able to find him like we would find a passive object with the powers of empirical investigation. Rather, we must find the clues to his reality that he has written into the universe, including into us. That is why, if God exists, we would expect to find that he appeals to our rational faculties. If we were made 'in his image' as rational, personal beings, there should be some resonance between his mind and ours. It also means that reason alone won't be enough. The Playwright can only be known through personal revelation.

For many years I looked at life like a case at law. It was a series of proofs. When you’re young you prove how brave you are, or smart; then, what a good lover; then, a good father; finally, how wise, or powerful. But underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. That one moved...on an upward path towards some elevation, where...I would be justified, or even condemned. A verdict anyway. I think now that my disaster really began I looked up one day...and the bench was empty. No judge in sight. And all that remained was the endless argument with oneself, this pointless litigation of existence before an empty bench...which of course, is another way of saying – despair.

If our highest goal in life is the good of our family, then we will tend to care less for other families. If our highest goal is the good of our nation, tribe or race, then w will tend to be racist or nationalistic. If our ultimate goal in life is our own individual happiness, then we will put our economic and power interests ahead of those of others. Only if God is our summum bonum, our ultimate good and life centre, will we find our heart drawn out not only to people of all families, races and classes, but to the whole world in general.


The Reason for God by Timothy Keller

8:37 PMsent a prayer


Sometimes they seemed to remember the old love, and realise that is was still there, unchanged and as strong as ever. And sometimes they forgot.

When they are babies you can revel in them, you can kiss their cheek as hard as you dare and get drunk on their smell and the velveteen sheen of their skin. When your children are babies, you can get stoned on the incredible living fact of them. That all changes as they grow. You hold them. And one day you realise you have stopped holding them.

I realised by the time they are in their teens, you can let years drift by without really touching them. The physical expression of your love – the hugs, the kisses, the way you are allowed to touch their hair – all disappears. When Rufus and I came into shy, fleeting contact now – the hurried hug, the awkward kiss, those gestures of habit more than feeling – it was like an electric shock from the button of a lift, and we immediately recoiled with an alarm.

It’s hard to be the parent who always says no. it’s hard to be the one who always spoils the fun, who always urges caution, who always tries to keep their family out of the emergency ward and the police cells and the mortuary. But that’s the role that you seem to have forced upon me lately. I never wanted that role. You lot made me take it.

There comes a moment when you don’t recognise them. At the start, you have all this unconditional love. It’s as if you never knew you had that kind of love inside you that you were capable of feeling that strongly, that deeply. That much love. But then it changes, it changes almost without you noticing that it’s changed. Suddenly it feels like the connection to the past has been broken. It’s as brutal as that. As final as that. You just don’t recognise them any more. It’s as if they are a different person – I mean, quite literally, someone else. And that’s the big problem. How do you keep loving someone when they are no longer the same person? It’s not that you don’t love them. It’s worse than that. You don’t even know them.

Because there are times in your life when the possibility that you could ever get hurt simply does not cross your mind. Fleeting moments of freedom when you just feel immortal. When you know that nothing in this world can touch you. That, I thought, is the very best thing about being.


Starting Over by Tony Parsons

8:22 PMsent a prayer

Thursday, April 01, 2010

But why must everything always have a practical application? I'd been such a diligent soldier for years – working, producing, never missing a deadline, taking care of my loved ones, my gums and my credit record, voting etc. Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty?


When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realise you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wondered a few feet off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.


Could I have survived myself, by myself? I don't know. That's the thing about a human life – there's no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.


People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. His purpose was to shake you up, drive you out of that marriage that you needed to leave, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master and beat it.


This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape. There are two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.


Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention. If you don't have this, all your pleas and desires are boneless, floppy, inert; they swirl at your feet in a cold fog and never lift. So now I take the time every morning to search myself for specificity about what I am truly asking for.


Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort. Half of it you have no control over; half of it is absolutely in your hands, and your actions will show measurable consequence. Man is neither entirely a puppet of the gods, nor is he entirely the captain of his own destiny; he's a little of both. We gallop through our lives like circus performers balancing on two speeding side-by-side horses - one foot is on the horse called 'fate' and the other on the horse called 'free will'. And the question you have to ask every day is - which horse is which? Which horse do I need to stop worrying about because it's not under my control, and which do I need to steer with concentrated effort?


Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't, you will leak away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.


Why does suffering never end? Why must everything be repeated and repeated, never finishing, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day, you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love goes away. You are born with nothing - no watch, no T-shirt. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old.


Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

4:00 PMsent a prayer

I have not been fair to him; if anything, I'm guilty of the same offense: trying to keep the life we had from being ruined. Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't stand the thought of them changing? Is it a crime when you love someone so much that you can't see them clearly?

Twenty-eight years is a long time to think about why I loved you, and it's not for the reasons I first assumed: because you swam in the space below my heart; or because you stanched the youth I was bleeding out daily; or because one day you might take care of me when I couldn't take care of myself. Love is not an equation, as your father once wanted me to believe it. It's not a contract, and it's not a happy ending. It is the slate under the chalk and the ground buildings rise from and the oxygen in the air. It is the place I come back to, no matter where I've been headed. I loved you, Bethany, because you were the one relationship I never had to earn. You arrived in this world loving me more, even when I did not deserve it.

Bad is not an absolute, but a relative term. Ask the robber who used the cask he stole to feed his infant; the rapist who was sexually abused as a child; the kidnapper who truly believed he was saving a life. And just because you break the law doesn't mean you have intentionally crossed the line into evil. Sometimes the line creeps up on you, and before you know it, you're standing on the other side.

What if memories get stored in the brain, and they aren't even necessarily ones we've had? What if we're hardwired with a whole iceberg of experiences, and our minds use only a tip of them?

Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

At that moment, everything comes clear. It's like having someone walk up to a chalky window that you've been trying to see through for days, and wiping it clean. Some people have a detailed history, others don't. There are plenty of adopted children who grow up without knowing an once of information about their birth parents; there are criminals who walk out of jail and become pillars of the community. At any moment, a person can start over. And that's not half a life, but simply a real one.

It is also a terrifying prospect: that the relationships we use as the cornerstones of our personalities are not given by default but are a choice; that it's all right to feel closer to a friend than we do to a parent; that someone who's betrayed us in the past might be the same person with whom we build a future.

If it had been easy for Romeo to get Juliet, nobody would have cared. Same goes for Cyrano and Don Quixotye and Gatsby and their respective paramours. What captures the imagination is watching men throw themselves at a brick wall over and over again, and wondering if this is the time that they won't be able to get back up. For everyone who adores a happy ending, there's someone else who cannot help but rubberneck at the accident on the side of the road.

You wonder, though, what would have happened if Juliet's best friend started flirting with Romeo. If Gatsby got drunk one night and told Daisy how he really felt. If any of those poor romantic fools would have driven hours north to the Hopi reservation and doubled back, the word sucker fizzing like acid in their bellies as they sneaked glances across the car at the woman they loved, knowing she was going home to another man.

Could it really be that simple? Could romantic love and platonic love and parental love all be different facets of the same diamond – brilliant, no matter which face is turned up to the sun?

There are two kinds of love. In the safe kind, you look for someone who's exactly like you. It's what most folks settle for. But then there's the other kind of love. Everyone's born with a ragged edge, and some folks crave the piece that's a perfect fit. You'll search for it forever, if you have to. And if you're lucky enough to find it, it looks so right, you start to tear at your own seams, thinking, maybe I could look just as perfect. But then of course, when you try to get close to the other half, you don;t fit anymore. That kind of love ... you come out of it a different person than you were when you started.

I realise, suddenly, that everyone is a liar. Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rick as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

The only way someone can leave you is if you let them. And I'm not doing that. It may look like that today, or tomorrow, or even a month from now, but one day you're going to wake up and see that this whole time you've been gone, you've only been headed back to where you started. And I'll be there, waiting. I'm just trusting you enough to come back.

What if it turns out that a life isn't defined by who you belong to or where you came from, by what you wished for or whom you've lost, but instead by the moment you spend getting from each of these places to the next?


Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult

3:45 PMsent a prayer

Saturday, March 20, 2010


I learned a lot that night. For example, that part of being the magician's assistant means coming face-to-face with illusion. That invisibility is really just knotting your body in a certain way and letting the black curtain fall over you. That people don't vanish into thin air; that when you can't find someone, it's because you've been misdirected to look elsewhere.

I think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is. (Vladimer Nabokov)

But a witness is defined through what he sees, not what he says, And just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.

You can boil your life down to a single suitcase, if you desperately have to. Ask yourself what you really need and it won't be what you imagine - you will easily toss aside unfinished work, and bills, and your daily calendar to make room for the pair of flannel pajamas you wear when it rains, and the stone your child gave you that is shaped like a heart, and the battered paperback you revisit every April, because it was what you were reading the first time you fell in love. It turns out that what's important is not everything that you've accumulated all these years, but those few things you can carry with you.

Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.

You think you know the world you are living in. If you can feel it, and touch it, and smell it, and taste it, then it must be so. You tell yourself that you would bet your life on the simple fact that the sky is blue. And then one day someone comes along and informs you empathetically that you're wrong. Blue, you insist. Blue as the ocean. Blue as a whale. Blue as my daughter's eyes. But that person shakes his head, and everyone else backs him up. You poor girl, they say. All of those things - the ocean, the whale, her eyes - they're green. You've gotten them mixed up. You've had it wrong all along.

Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult
12:40 AMsent a prayer