"We know nothing of religion here: we think only of Christ."

As C. S. Lewis is one the best and brightest authors, I'm going to share a few quotes from his book, The Great Divorce.

"There have been men before now who got interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself . . . as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist. There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a second thought to Christ. You see it in smaller matters. Did you never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organizer of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares." (Ch. 9)

~ 

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened." (Ch. 9)

~ 

"We know nothing of religion here: we think only of Christ." (Chapter 5)

~ 

"No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods." (Ch. 11)

~ 

"'Oh, of course. I'm wrong. Everything I say or do is wrong, according to you.  

'But of course!' said the Spirit, shining with love and mirth so that my eyes were dazzled. 'That's what we all find when we reach this country. We've all been wrong! That's the great joke. There's no need to go on pretending one was right! After that we begin living.'" (Ch. 11)

~ 

"There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him." (Ch. 11) 

They shall sing in the ways of the Lord

I know to many of you this blog has long been dead. But I'd like to think he's only been sleeping, gone on an extended vacation; hibernating; but still very much alive.
And in the hope of awakening this old Blog o'Mine, I'd like to share a page out of Spurgeon's Morning + Evening from February 1st that I've found to be such a help to me and, I hope, to you as well.

"They shall sing in the ways of the Lord."

Psalm 138:5

The time when Christians begin to sing in the ways of the Lord is when they first lose their burden at the foot of the Cross. Not even the songs of the angels seem so sweet as the first song of rapture which gushes from the inmost soul of the forgiven child of God. You know how John Bunyan describes it. He says when poor Pilgrim lost his burden at the Cross, he gave three great leaps, and went on his way singing—

“Blest Cross! blest Sepulchre! blest rather be The Man that there was put to shame for me!”

Believer, do you recollect the day when your fetters fell off? Do you remember the place when Jesus met you, and said, “I have loved thee with an everlasting love; I have blotted out as a cloud thy transgressions, and as a thick cloud thy sins; they shall not be mentioned against thee any more forever.” Oh! what a sweet season is that when Jesus takes away the pain of sin. When the Lord first pardoned my sin, I was so joyous that I could scarce refrain from dancing. I thought on my road home from the house where I had been set at liberty, that I must tell the stones in the street the story of my deliverance. So full was my soul of joy, that I wanted to tell every snow-flake that was falling from heaven of the wondrous love of Jesus, who had blotted out the sins of one of the chief of rebels. But it is not only at the commencement of the Christian life that believers have reason for song; as long as they live they discover cause to sing in the ways of the Lord, and their experience of his constant lovingkindness leads them to say, “I will bless the Lord at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth.” See to it, brother, that thou magnifiest the Lord this day.

“Long as we tread this desert land,

New mercies shall new songs demand.”

To read is to fly

Mud pies

In "The Weight of Glory," C.S. Lewis says:

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

 Charles Spurgeon ought to stir us up even further when he says:

O true believer, called by grace and washed in the precious blood of Jesus, thou hast tasted better drink than the river of this world's pleasure can give thee; thou hast had fellowship with Christ; thou hast obtained the joy of seeing Jesus, and leaning thine head upon His bosom. Do the trifles, the songs, the honors, the merriment of this earth content thee after that? If thou art wandering after the waters of Egypt, oh, return quickly to the one living fountain; the waters of Sihor may be sweet to the Egyptians, but they will prove only bitterness to thee. What hast thou to do with them? Jesus asks this question - what wilt thou answer him?

109 books to read before you die

There are so many different lists of the greatest classics, each one claiming to be "the list." But this one was 1) smaller than 1001 titles and 2) didn't have so many trashy modernist novels I have no wish whatsoever to read. So I picked it. I've also tweaked it a bit.
It makes me want to quit everything and read. My goal is to finish this list and be able to cross out every one. And if I ever finish this list, I'd like to tackle another.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (Confession: I've only read the Fellowship)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 My Antonia - Willa Cather

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 The Old Man in the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

101 Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper

102 Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

103 The Iliad - Homer

104 The Odyssey - Homer (Currently reading)

105 Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

106 Black Beauty - Anna Sewell

107 Silas Marner - George Eliot (Marian Evans)

108 In the Reign of Terror - G.A. Henty

109 Ben Hur - Lew Wallace

Weekend according to Instagram

I spent Columbus Day weekend with (most of) the family at our friend's penthouse in Fort Walton Beach, FL. There was a hammock. On the deck of the penthouse. The weather was perfect and my weekend consisted of sleeping on the beach, sleeping in the hammock, sleeping in my bed, reading on the beach, reading in the hammock, reading in my bed. Oh, and a liiittle bit of watching movies, playing bananagrams, and snuggling with friends' puppy. It was wonderful. Did I mention there was a hammock on the deck of the penthouse?

Eudora Welty on reading

"I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. My mother read to me. She'd read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when we were in her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story. She'd read to me in the dining room on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the story with "Cuckoo," and at night when I'd got in my own bed. I must have given her no peace. Sometimes she read to me in the kitchen while she sat churning, and the churning sobbed along with any story. It was my ambition to have her read to me while I churned; once she granted my wish, but she read off my story before I brought her butter. She was an expressive reader. When she was reading "Puss in Boots," for instance, it was impossible not to know that she distrusted all cats.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them."

(Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings)

Happy day.

The sun is shining, my window's open, birds are singing, Frank Sinatra's playing. Ahh. Spring.

A nice, long bike ride and reading Anne of Ingleside were simply perfect ways to top off this lovely day.

Well, no snow for us here, unlike some lucky people I know. Just cold, wet, gloomy rain. But we decided to make the best of it anyhow. Kelley and I had a delightful afternoon while she read A Room With a View (which is strangely ironic; it's about two girls temporarily living in Florence, Italy - sound familiar?) out loud and I did some knitting by the fireplace. Oh, and at this rate, I think I might be able to finish my scarf by my 80th birthday.

P.S. I think I have a new favorite (okay, one of my new favorites) hymn, it's number 473, in our hymnal.

Have you heard the voice of Jesus

Softly pleading with your heart?

Have you felt His presence glorious,

As He calls your soul apart,

With a love so true and loyal,

Love divine that ever flows

From a Saviour, righteous, royal, 

And a cross that mercy shows?

Have you heard the voice of mercy

Granting peace and pardon pure?

Have you felt the balm of Calvary

Binding all your wounds secure?

Was there ever such salvation?

Was there ever care like this?

See the Saviour’s grief and passion, 

Grace and mercy’s gentle kiss.

Have you heard the Saviour calling

All to leave and follow Him?

Have you felt His Person drawing

With compulsion lives to win?

Hearken to His invitation,

To the music of God’s grace;

Let the peace of God’s salvation 

Fill your soul, and love embrace.

Let me impress you with my amazing math skills

Cold weather + an early morning race + an afternoon soccer game = one really tired, really sore, and really cold girl.

And,

Cold weather + fireplace + hot cocoa + a good book = :)

I'm pretty much an incredible mathematician. Pretty much...

Happy Get To Know Your Customers Day!

Some thoughts on this incredibly brilliant holiday:

Okay, seriously, how much rain can we possibly get? I've played one soccer game and the season started weeks ago. All my games have been canceled due to what? Go ahead, just guess. Angry parents? A referee shortage? No. RAIN.

But it does have its pluses. I haven't had to referee a single game yet. That's a big plus. But frisbee was canceled tonight. That's a definite minus.

Dr. Grant, his utterly brilliant lectures, and his enthralling "opportunities" (which is just his own way of saying, test) have continued to brighten my day - day after day, after day, after day...well, you get the point. He and his bow tie never cease to bring a smile to my face. He's taught me all the things I just couldn't live without knowing. Like, did you know that the Star Chamber was instituted in 1627 by Charles I in order to enforce his supposed divine rights? Or that the Presbyterian remonstrance was established in 1634? Or that Jenny Geddes (who knows how to spell her name...she was a milk maid for cryin' out loud!) hurled her milk stool at the archbishop and brought about the demise of both king and archbishop? Yeah, neither did I.

So I finished reading The Last of the Mohicans last night. Oh. My. Word. I still can't get over the ending. You know those great books with the amazingly happy ending that stick with you and just make you feel all warm and happy inside? Yeah, well this wasn't one of them. I don't mean to spoil the book for those of you who haven't read it yet, but, I mean really, what kind of author kills off the two main characters?! I mean did Cooper just one day tell his wife, "I'm gonna a write a book with great characters - better than the world has ever known. Everyone will love them...and then, right at the very end, I'm gonna kill 'em all! I'll show 'em who's boss! Yeah, that's just what I'll do." And that's just what he did. So, I've decided this is how I'm going to imagine the ending. This is how it should have been: Magua is running away with his captive, Cora, and just as he thinks he's won, Uncas jumps out from behind him, kills him, and tells Magua as he's dying, "[Insert something really clever here]". Then he sweeps Cora off her feet, tells her he loves her, and you know what, they live happily ever after! Dreams do come true [in books], I always knew it! Yay!

P.S. - This is a real holiday. I'm just sad I missed National Bring Your Teddy Bear To Work & School day yesterday. Greatest holiday idea EVER!