Oh, satisfy us early with Your mercy,
That we may rejoice and be glad all our days!
And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us,
And establish the work of our hands for us;
Yes, establish the work of our hands.
{Psalm 90: 14, 17}
~
Category: Inspiration
Merry Christmas
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn 1606 – 1669
Simeon’s Song of Praise (1669)
And behold, there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon, and this man was just and devout, waiting for the Consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. So he came by the Spirit into the temple. And when the parents brought in the Child Jesus, to do for Him according to the custom of the law, 28 he took Him up in his arms and blessed God and said:
“Lord, now You are letting Your servant depart in peace,
According to Your word;
For my eyes have seen Your salvation
Which You have prepared before the face of all peoples,
A light to bring revelation to the Gentiles,
And the glory of Your people Israel.”
Luke 2: 25-32
~
Foggy Memories
I read somewhere once that we write so we won’t forget. I recently joined a memoir writing class at a local library and you know, it has me digging deep into the recesses of my foggy memory for life experiences. It’s hard. Scraps of life jump out to me, childhood games of pretend, forcing my sister to eat grass because we were rabbits. An award ceremony, the cold, hard delight of that basketball trophy gripped in my hand. My grandma’s cigarette-smoke filled home, the soap operas, Smurfs, ice cold milk in old jelly jars, and stale cookies out of her raccoon-shaped cookie jar.
I hear bits of my teacher trying to consul me about my lack of brain function over math. I feel the pain after hitting the wall instead of my brother with my pathetic attempt at a punch. Flashes of my high school and college jobs, the chop suey sold and all the apples and ramen noodles consumed by this broke college student.
Little fragments tinkle and crumble through my hand. But I’m forgetting. My mind is blank in some spots. I remember bits of my wedding, the hot, sticky, humid September air. The kiss from the leathery lips of my husband’s grandfather. I remember smiling so much my lips cracked, the frosting up my nose, my new husband’s hand on my satin-clad waist.
I must keep remembering in ink, so the remembering in life will never be forgotten. I must remember my babies births, that moment when they broke free of my womb and I see their precious face, lips, hands, and toes for the first time. It’s slipping away in a jumble of fog, life, hurt, joys and the simmering soup of time.
I don’t want to forget that first car my dad helped me buy, or the beauty, intrigue, and tension of my first love. The summer camp nights, big group of friends gazing at a sky full of stars. The miles I walked on campuses, Professor Grant’s face from English Lit or a sociology class that turned out fascinating. The Ph.D student from China, who I met and became close with, him cooking Chinese for me and I dubbing him Doc, his laugh echoing and head shaking at my lame attempt with his name. I could go on and on.
I must write to remember, keeping my life moments alive. I have these memories that only I can save from slipping away forever.
~
2016 Favorite Reads
I like to keep track of my reading each year, through Goodreads, journals, or lists. I recently changed my blog home and now I’m trying to find a good place and way to record what my children and I read. I’m still working on that, so instead of my usually massive list of what books we read, I’ve been sharing just those ones that we have loved THIS year and in this moment. It is so, so hard to narrow this list down, but I based my decision not necessarily on just the excellence of the book itself, but also on how it impacted me at the TIME that I read it. So, here is my favorite read list for 2016!
My 2016 Favorite Reads:
1. My favorite book this year! A White Bird Flying by Bess Streeter Aldrich – I can’t tell you how much this book meant to me…how our dreams and reality war in our affections. Laura is a deep thinking child with dreams of writing and loving on words…an elusive dream world that can’t quite be explained. It sort of feels like a white bird flying through the air. Grandmother Deal passes away and young Laura is devastated…Grandma was the only one who really seemed to understand and listen to her…she will honor her Grandmother and never forget what she gave up by living her life grasping after her grandmother’s and her own shared dream. Little does she know that Grandmother did live her dream, a dream that lives on through the generations. Laura has choices to make, stories to live.This book is written with beautiful prose and lovely nature descriptions. The author’s love of Nebraska and the plains is woven and intricate to this story. I just love the depth of the characters and how each life is so interwoven. The beauty of generations is heavily shown here…the good, the bad, and the ugly of family relationships and how they shape us. This starts off a bit slow, but is just so, so very lovely! I HIGHLY recommend this title.
I didn’t realize that A White Bird Flying is the second in a series and I am now reading the first, A Lantern in Her Hand, which is just beautiful. I also read Mother Mason by Aldrich and was deeply moved by the beauty, hardships, and humor of motherhood shared within that title. Highly recommend this author and I can’t wait to read more of her work.
2. Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery – I’m a huge fan of L.M. Montgomery and I reread this title at a particularly hard time this year and it just blessed the socks off of me . The young girl blossoming as she serves and loves her father. She doesn’t do anything spectacular except create an atmosphere of love and home to all those around her. And really maybe servant-hood IS the most spectacular thing we can do with our life. Just beautiful.
3. This is kind of a strange thing, two beautiful titles have melded together a bit for me. The Broken Way: A Daring Path into The Abundant Life by Ann Voskamp and my rereading of Hinds’ Feet On High Places by Hannah Hurnard have been just so beautifully challenging and life-altering in so many ways. I’m still slowly savoring both of these, but I put them high on favorites for the year. It’s not simple to put into words, why I love these so much, but it has to do with finding freedom in just resting and trusting the Lord in the midst of our lives. That the brokenness, valleys, and heart-wrenching things are REAL life on this sin-soaked world. We can see God in those and live abundantly even when life isn’t safe or our idea of perfect. In fact, a careful reading of the Bible reveals life as, I believe, a barren desert with Jesus as our Spring of Living water. Voskamp’s writing can be a bit tricky to get into, but if you dig deep you will find lovely gems.
4. Winter Birds by Jamie Langston Turner – This was hard, sad, yet beautiful read. This story is told through the 80+ year old eyes of a woman looking back over her life, looking at the Christian faith as an outsider, and explaining her life, questioning death through the observing of birds, Shakespeare, and Time Life’s obituaries. Sound weird? It isn’t. It’s beautiful and thought-provoking. I’ve always read Christian fiction and it’s hard to find well-written, non-formulaic titles in this genre, but this one is excellent. I look forward to reading more of this author’s work.
5. City of Tranquil Light: A Novel by Bo Caldwell – This fiction title is based on a true story about Mennonite missionaries to China in the early 1900’s. Hauntingly beautiful and thought-provoking. I was so encouraged and challenged in my faith. I couldn’t put this down.
6. The Gown of Glory by Agnes Sligh Turnbull – I must share this lovely fiction title with you! A young minister and his wife arrive in Ladykirk, hoping that this is just the stepping stone to their big ministry position…only to find themselves still in the same place 25 years later. David Lyall is a humble, bookish man, who hopes his gentle sermons and life of love mean something in this world. This follows their life and family and how simple loving can impact deeply.
7. Romancing Your Child’s Heart by Monte Swan – a beautiful, insightful parenting title. Swan challenges us to look at children as whole, wonderful people deserving of the love of the Lord.
8. The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District by James Rebank – an interesting memoir about real life as a shepherd in the north of England. I read this around and during my trip in The Lake District, so it came alive to me. A bit of rough language, but I really loved this honest look at shepherding.
9. Applesauce Needs Sugar by Victoria Case – This was a fantastic memoir! This follows the life of a Canadian pioneer family working hard to better themselves and put food on the table for their growing family. I found most of the stories had a subtle humor that made me chuckle out loud, namely the ways the industrious mother went about her wild plans all while convincing the father that it was his idea in the first place. 😉 This book has an interesting perspective in that it shows a strong-willed, excellent business woman in a time when women had no say, no vote, no property…nothing. I love the relationship portrayed between the parents, not perfect but choosing love…the discipline and well-oiled way the mother runs her big family of eventually 10 has me in awe.
10. The Book of Stillmeadow by Gladys Taber – no year would be complete without a little side of Taber. If you’ve never read her, Gladys wrote from the 1940’s onward, on the daily and seasonal happenings of her farm Stillmeadow. I know some people think she is repetitive and slow, and she probably is…but I love her writing. I think the two things that strike me the most are these: 1. she pays close attention to the small details of life and 2. she uses words in such a beautiful way. This title started off a bit slow, but as I got into it, I was just enchanted. The beauty of home, family, animals, cooking, and of nature. The glorious bits of light and beauty we see in the midst of the mundane, if we are brave enough to just stop fretting and being disgusted by it all, we will be given a beautiful gift right where we are. I have Stillmeadow Sampler and Stillmeadow Daybook for savoring in my book stack now.
I have a few others that I could mention here, but I’m going to try to show restraint, as I really do think these are my most favorites of this year, or at least touched me the most. I would be amiss to not mention the Book of Books, The Holy Bible,…I journaled through it this year, using a wide margin NKJV Bible, with no footnotes, which was lovely. I’m planning on using a different version next year and doing it again…the richness, life, and love in the Bible are life-changing.
What were your absolute, favorite reads of this year?
~
Anne of Green Gables: Chapter 4
Anne awakes to a mixture of “delightful thrill” and “horrible remembrance” because she is NOT to stay at Green Gables because she is NOT a boy. pg 30
Montgomery’s shines here…
“Below the garden a green field lush with clover sloped down to the hollow where the brook ran and scores of white birches grew, upspringing airily out of an undergrowth suggestive of delightful possibilities in ferns and mosses and woodsy things generally. Beyond it was a hill, green and feathery with spruce and fir; there was a gap in it where the gray gable end of the little house she had seen from the other side of the Lake of Shining Waters was visible.” pg 31
“Anne’s beauty-loving eyes lingered on it all, taking everything greedily in; she had looked on so many unlovely places in her life, poor child; but this was as lovely as anything she had ever dreamed.” pg 31
I love this thought. How our souls, in their own way, need feeding. They can be starved in a sense. Something as simple as a flower in a vase or a beautiful sunset can feed that inner need. I believe that in some small way beauty points us unconsciously to our Lord Jesus.
The anthropomorphism of nature is so charming and contributes to a sense of delight and mystery. Brooks laughing and trees dancing…Montgomery is so good at drawing us into the feeling of nature.
Anne’s optimism is just so refreshing and contagious!
“Isn’t it a splendid thing that there are mornings?” pg 32
“But I’m glad it’s not rainy today because it’s easier to be cheerful and bear up under affliction on a sunshiny day. I feel that I have a good deal to bear up under. It’s all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it’s not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?” pg 33
I love that…”bear up under affliction”! 🙂 Again, I love how reading has helped her put things into perspective here. Her life hasn’t been easy, but reading heroic deeds has helped her cope in some ways, and given her courage.
Poor Marilla is confused and befuddled by Anne.
“…she had an uncomfortable feeling that while this odd child’s body might be there at the table her spirit was far away in some remote airy cloudland, borne aloft on the wings of imagination. Who would want such a child about the place?” pg 33
Anne on wanting to go outdoors and explore…
“If I can’t stay here there is no use in my loving Green Gables. And if I go out there and get acquainted with all those trees and flowers and the orchard and the brook, I’ll not be able to help loving it. It’s hard enough now, so I won’t make it any harder. I want to go out so much – everything seems to be calling to me, ‘Anne, Anne, come out to us. Anne, Anne we want a playmate’- but it’s better not. There is no use in loving things if you have to be torn from them, is there? and it’s so hard to keep from loving things, isn’t it? That was why I was so glad when I thought I was going to live here. I thought I’d have so many things to love and nothing to hinder me. But that brief dream is over. I am resigned to my fate now, so I don’t think I’ll go out for fear I’ll get unresigned again.” pg 34
A cynical look at this might believe Anne is slightly manipulative, but knowing how Montgomery portrayed her character, I believe her to be totally sincere. I know she is impulsive and rash, yet her outbursts of emotion and love for beauty feel genuine to me. I really think that in some ways, her stark life made her all the more aware of and appreciative of beauty in its simplest forms. It makes me wonder that in my comfortable lifestyle and lavish American outlook, how many simple things of beauty I miss because I’m not purposefully looking for beauty or have too much STUFF or I’m just ungrateful in a small way. I also hope that I can keep wonder alive for myself and my children, where we want to be “acquainted” with nature and appreciate it. I feel this ties a little bit into media use. Too much media dulls our appreciation of nature, because who can complete with its drug-like effects? Anyway, 😉 I’m going off on a tangent here as I think on Anne’s comments in this chapter.
What stood out to you? 🙂
~
Hope
Snow pouring down. Cold, wet, gray, and blindingly white. Mirrors my soul a bit. Yet, hope is like a thing with feathers, indeed. Somehow just acknowledging that I can’t control others, that I have to love despite hate and frustrations, and that I am loved deeply and completely despite my flaws. This hope truly perches in my soul. It takes wing and it soars into the doubting parts of myself, it alights on the self-loathing and pecks away at it. It sings beautifully in the face of the storm, no matter its fury. I gaze at my new, wonderful bird feeder. It has been inundated with Dark-Eyed Juncos. Fluffy, fat, delightful fellows. They don’t seem to see the snow. They shake it off, dance a bit, grab the seed, and flutter in happiness. Those seeds of hope. There is always joy, love, and light in any bit of darkness. Jesus is that Hope. A gentleness and love pours from Him, making me great, strengthening me to sing again and again in the face of bracing winds, and icy fingers of life. Hope to sing long and loud, hope to rise up on wings like eagles.
{ Emily Dickinson’s poem Hope is a Thing with Feathers, Psalm 18:35, Isaiah 40:31}
~
Ginger Snaps
These are so delicious. Soft, chewy, and spicy. Just thought I would share one of our favorite autumn and winter cookie recipes. These are what I’m giving our neighbors for Christmas this year.
(I adapted this recipe from online years ago, so forgive me for not giving due credit!)
Ginger Snaps
1/2 cup melted butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup molasses
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
~Beat butter and sugar together. Add egg. Stir in molasses. Add dry ingredients. Roll into balls. Roll in sugar. I like to use parchment paper on my pans. If you double or triple this recipe, be careful with the molasses. I actually use 3/4 cup of molasses on a doubled recipe.
Bake in a 350 degree oven for 8-10 minutes or until firm. These are good warm, but GREAT second day, cooled and chewy. Great for dipping in coffee or milk. 🙂
Yum! 🙂
~
Anne of Green Gables: Chapter 3
Poor Marilla. She is probably still nervously reeling from Rachel’s Job-friend-like 😉 advice, and now she has to deal with a GIRL.
Anne’s outbursts are funny, but man, she really is such a cheerful child for having had very little love in her life. Her imagination and the beautiful ideas that she has read in books have helped keep the hope alive, a little bit at least, I think.
I love this part…
“Oh, this is the most tragical thing that ever happened to me!”
Something like a reluctant smile, rather rusty from long disuse, mellowed Marilla’s grim expression.
pg 24
What’s your name?
The child hesitated for a moment.
“Will you please call me Cordelia?” she said eagerly.
“Call you Cordelia! Is that your name?”
“No-o-o, it’s not exactly my name, but I would love to be called Cordelia. It’s such a perfectly elegant name.”
“I don’t know what on earth you mean. If Cordelia isn’t your name, what is it?”
pg 24
This whole part is just so funny and sweet. Marilla’s bewilderment, Anne’s anguish…so many little things. I find myself in the “depths of despair” quite often myself, in fact, my husband sometimes will ask me if I’m wallowing in them. He knows me so well. Ha. 🙂
I love the description of the room from Anne’s point of view…I laughed out loud specifically at this…
“…with a fat, red velvet pincushion hard enough to turn the point of the most adventurous pin. ”
pg 27
I love how Montgomery is showing us Anne’s frame of mind through her perception of the room. Such beautiful writing!
I love Matthew’s heart here…
“I suppose – we could hardly be expected to keep her.”
“I should say not. What good would she be to us?”
“We might be some good to her,” said Matthew suddenly and unexpectedly. ❤
pg 28-29
And upstairs, in the east gable, a lonely, heart-hungry, friendless child cried herself to sleep. pg 29
Aww. Sweet, yet sad chapter.
~
Love
Have you ever thought that people give love the way they understand it? It might be a hot meal prepared for us, hugs given, kind words, gifts, or working hard to provide for us. The way love is given and received is a complicated thing. We all are shaped by our personalities, upbringing, and experiences, from a baby, fast forwarding to who we are now.
As a follower of Jesus Christ, my love should grow and move beyond just my understanding. It begins to become something that defies all explanation and boxes that I can put it in. It transcends how I was raised or my personalities and experiences. It begins to be unexplainable.
Why? Jesus Christ. He is my Ultimate Example. He humbled Himself to become a lowly person. He came from the Throne Room and chose not only to be human, but the lowest form. He gives love in a way that I will never understand and it defies all finite logic. You can’t figure this sort of Love out with your mind. I have to take it by faith.
I was lying on my bed, comfy beneath my quilts, when these thoughts started rumbling around in my head. Maybe something between a desperate prayer for help in all my relationships, and the half dreamlike state I find myself in before the first hot cup of coffee.
What if I could see clearly the why behind how people love? What if I could read their minds? What if I could receive their love perfectly and give love perfectly to each person I meet? It could radically change the way relationships and the world works. However, I can’t do this perfectly in a fallen world. I have to by faith choose to love like Jesus. It isn’t easy, but far too often I use the difficulty of something as an excuse to not even try.
I am super challenged to gaze at the Amazing Love Jesus lavishes on me. I’m challenged to take this love by faith and not try to figure it out. Just to bask under it, believe it, and live through it. Loving that child when they are super difficult because Jesus loves difficult me. Not trying to guess and judge suspiciously the motives of people around me, but to love and care for them with no strings attached. Loving with no fear, because relationships are going to hurt, expose, use, and frustrate me. I’m challenged because Jesus loved without fear. He was ridiculed, abandoned, and killed, yet He didn’t let that hold back His love. Loving and accepting myself as a creation of God, not by some arbitrary standard the culture measures with or experiences that have influenced my view of myself.
I want to love as Jesus loves, a defying Love. This is a “radical” love that rejects all hurt, hate, and frustrations. Love that views people and relationships as the main reason for living, working, and dying. Jesus loves people! Nothing can ever be more important to Him then the saving love and redemption of all people. A relationship between Him and us. I waste far too much time focusing on trivial things and forget His unconditional love. And then I start thinking too much and distrusting too often. I try to figure out all the catch phrases in the Christian culture…tough love, love the sinner not the sin, discipleship, theology, and on and on. Maybe there is an element of truth in them, but the truth comes back to Jesus. Just love. For me, I must move away from rationalizing, figuring things out, judging, or categorizing and begin to love in the raw.
I’m unfinished, and unlovable and yet Jesus loves me with a PERFECT, unending love. He moves, working in me to strengthen me in right choices against my sinful nature and hatred and craziness, but His first ingredient is love. Jesus loves all the bare, insecure parts of me because He is Love. I don’t have to understand any part of this, I just have to believe it. May I love even a fraction like this!
~
Anne of Green Gables: Chapter 2
Now we come to dear Matthew and Anne. The very illustration on the front of my beat-up paperback is such a sweet part of this chapter. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, however.
Montgomery shares some of her lovely nature-aware writing here…
“It was a pretty road, running along between snug farmsteads, with now and again a bit of balsamy fir wood to drive through or a hollow where wild plums hung out their filmy bloom. The air was sweet with the breath of many apple orchards and the meadows sloped away in the distance to horizon mists of pearl and purple; while
The little birds sang as if it were
The one day of summer in all the year.” pg 9
I adore “farmstead” and “balsamy”.
I find Matthew’s shyness around women to be endearing and slightly humorous. Perhaps having Marilla for a sister and how long has Rachel Lynde been his neighbor I wonder, may not have helped his shyness? He dare not have any opinion or maybe never could get a word in edgewise. Remember even a disorderly stream straightens at the sight of Mrs. Rachel!
And now we are introduced to our Dear Friend of the Ages…
“A child of about eleven, garbed in a very short, very tight, very ugly dress of yellowish gray wincey. She wore a faded brown sailor hat and beneath the hat, extending down her back, were two braids of very thick, decidedly red hair. Her face was small, white and thin, also much freckled; her mouth was large and so were her eyes, that looked green in some lights and moods and gray in others.” pg 11
I love this…
“…our discerning extraordinary observer might have concluded that no commonplace soul inhabited the body of this stray woman-child of whom shy Matthew Cuthbert was so ludicrously afraid.” pg 11
I hope I can be a discerning observer with people, especially children. Even just a good observer, not even extraordinary. 😉 Caring about each person as unique and special.
Oh, Anne, you and your cheery tree!
“It’s so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn’t it? They were good, you know – the asylum people. But there is so little scope for the imagination in an asylum – only just in the other orphans.” pg 12
I love how Anne immediately sees a friend in Matthew and really starts sharing pretty deep thoughts and feelings. She is so open. She tries to see good in people…I love this,
“A merchant in Hopeton last winter donated three hundred yards of wincey to the asylum. Some people said it was because he couldn’t sell it, but I’d rather believe that it was out of the kindness of his heart, wouldn’t you?” pg 14
I love how she calls the Island the “bloomiest place”. Sigh.
And after Matthew telling he doesn’t know what makes the roads red,
“Well, that is one of the things to find out sometime. Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive – it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?” pg 15
That above quote reminds me of the British educator Charlotte Mason’s quote, “Not what we have learned, but what we are waiting to know is the delectable part of knowledge.” School Education, pg 273
Scope for the imagination. ❤
“…people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?” pg 15
“Yes, it’s red,” she said resignedly. “Now you see why I can’t be perfectly 🙂 happy. Nobody could who had red hair. I don’t mind the other things so much – the freckles and the green eyes and my skinniness. I can imagine them away. I can imagine that I have a beautiful rose leaf complexion and lovely starry violet eyes. But I cannot imagine that red hair away. I do my best. I think to myself, ‘Now my hair is a glorious raven black, black as the raven’s wing.’ But all the time I know it is just plain red, and it breaks my heart. It will be my life long sorrow.” 🙂 pg 16
Oh my! There are so many good lines and parts in this chapter! How she asks Matthew if he would rather be “divinely beautiful” or “dazzinglingly clever”. pg 17
How she is struck deeply by the beauty of the Avenue and insists on renaming it “the White Way of Delight”. pg 18
Barry’s Pond + Anne = The Lake of Shining Waters.
“Isn’t it splendid there are so many things to like in this world?” pg 20
She catches her first glimpse of Green Gables, Matthew growing a bit uneasy about the coming storm.
” Listen to the trees talking in their sleep ,” she whispered, as he lifted her to the ground. “What nice dreams they must have!” pg 22
What lovely trip home to Green Gables! What did you enjoy about this chapter?
~
Harold E. Kohn
Winter Thoughts
Long ago geographers and anthropologists proved that civilization advances most rapidly in the temperate zones where there is a mixture of weather conditions – summer balminess followed by autumn chill and wintry blasts of wind and snow. The year-round warmth of the tropics makes for spiritual torpor, mental laziness, and physical dullness. It takes all kinds of weather to stimulate men to be at their best.
While we pray for lives full of sunshine and pleasantness, God could do us no greater harm than to answer these prayers, for it takes all kinds of weather to grow a soul. Radiant days are necessary, when bright blessing shine down upon us from above and we absorb providential goodness as a sunny hillside soaks up light. Rainy days are needed when the spirit is refreshed and cleansed as when leaves, grasses, and crops of countless forests and fields drink deeply of heaven’s plenty. But wintry cold and snowy blasts from the North are also required in the temperate life -days when our lives are revealingly tested just as hard winds, heavy snows, and slashing sleet prove the strengths and weaknesses of a Northern woods, bowing snow-laden evergreen limbs in humility and breaking rotten branches off all the trees. So life’s hard weather demonstrates in us what deserves to last and what ought to fade and die. Only winter clearly shows which trees are evergreen!
All weathers make a soul. It was after blindness descended upon John Milton that he wrote his sublimest poetry. Beethoven’s loveliest sonatas were composed after he was stricken with deafness. What would Lincoln be without his lifelong seizures of melancholy? What would Christ be with be without His cross?
An American tourist in Italy watched a lumberjack at work. As the logs floated down the swift mountain stream the lumberman would thrust his hook into a particular log and draw it aside.
“Those logs all look alike, ” said the tourist. “Why do you pick out just a few?”
“They are not all alike,” the lumberman replied. “Some were grown low on the mountainside where they were protected all their lives from harsh winds. Their grains are coarse. They are good only for lumber, so I let them pass on down the stream to the lumber mills. But a few logs grew on the mountain top. From the the time they were tiny seedlings they felt the lashings of high winds and the weight of heavy snows, and they grow strong and tough and fine-grained. We do not use these for ordinary lumber. No, sir! These few are especially selected for choice work.”
So God uses wind buffeted souls for His choicest work.
Thoughts Afield
Harold E. Kohn
pg 132-133
Thinking this morning more on this and this lovely piece here also!
Anne of Green Gables : Chapter 1
I’ve always loved L.M. Montgomery’s beautiful nature descriptions and rich, deep characters. I forgot how humorous these books are for some reason. I don’t think humor comes through quite as strongly in some of Montgomery’s other titles. Maybe I just haven’t read enough of them or paid close enough attention! I was so glad to see how many of you sounded interested in this project , I think we all are truly kindred spirits.
Chapter 1 opens with our dear Mrs. Rachel Lynde…I chuckled at this…
“…for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum..” pg 1
I was so charmed how Lucy Maude introduces us to Mrs. Lynde by way of small, side comments alluding to her being into everyone’s business while keeping quite on top of her own.
I think words such as “betokened” need to have a resurgence in our English language. Really. They are GORGEOUS.
Upon seeing Matthew Cuthbert driving by in a SUIT and COLLAR no less , Mrs. Rachel, “…ponder as she might, could make nothing of it and her afternoon’s enjoyment was spoiled.” pg 3 🙂
I absolutely love the Naming of places and things through Montgomery’s writings. Swoon. And swoon again. Lynde’s Hollow. Green Gables. Bright River.
As Mrs. Lynde reaches Green Gables all in a dither, I love this about Marilla, “Here sat Marilla Cuthbert, when she sat at all, always slightly distrustful of sunshine, which seemed to her too dancing and irresponsible a thing for a world which was meant to be taken seriously; and here she sat now, knitting, and the table behind her was laid for supper.” pg 4
This made me think a bit of how opposite really Marilla is of Anne. We know, of course, what happens in this story, but one has to ponder if Marilla really needed Anne in a sense MORE than Anne needed her.
Mrs. Lynde’s shock and surprise is so funny and what’s the most funny thing about it is that she is so appalled the Marilla dare make a decision like this without informing or asking HER first. After Mrs. Lynde blasts Marilla with scary stories on orphans…this cracked me up…”This Job’s comforting seemed neither to offend nor alarm Marilla. She knitted steadily on.” pg 7
One has to overlook a few old-fashioned, NOT “politically correct” references in this chapter and focus really on the two characters that we are being introduced to…Rachel and Marilla. Opposite really, but they say opposites attract…and I was just thinking about how in some ways the friendship of these older ladies is just as kindred as the later one of Anne and Diana.
What jumped out to you?
~
A.M. Pine - Hearth Ridge Reflections 