Saturday Examen {Day 5}

The smell coming out of our public library was intoxicating! 😍♥️

I really enjoy this app and that they make Saturday a time of spiritual reflection over the past week. ♥️🙏🏻 I highly recommend listening (you can listen on their website, too!)

I jotted down their questions this week and found it so refreshing and challenging to honestly pray through them. It’s sobering to deeply examine oneself in the light of our Lord!

Does the LORD take pleasure in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the LORD?

Look: to obey is better than sacrifice, to pay attention is better than the fat of rams.

from 1 Samuel 15:22-23 CSB

How was your week? 🌲♥️🌲

•sweetness• {Day 2}

Lord, you do not withhold your compassion from me. Your constant love and truth will always guard me.

~Ps. 40:11

The Lord will send his faithful love by day; his song will be with me in the night – a prayer to the God of my life.

~Ps. 42:8

What secrets fly out of the earth

when I push the shovel-edge,

when I heave the dirt open?

And if there are no secrets

what is that smell that sweetness rising?

~ Mary Oliver

•inexhaustible•

My husband’s cousins gorgeous garden. 😍

What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, it’s filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 140-141

Wednesday Wonders

Listening… I really enjoyed Episode S6E85 Morning Time for Moms, Part 4, with Christina Baehr, here. I couldn’t figure out how to directly link. Christina is a cozy fantasy author and homeschooling mom who chatted with Cindy Rollins. Thanks to my friend, Kate, for telling me about it!

Reading… Know & Tell by Karen Glass. I was desperately in need of a refresher on all things Charlotte Mason as I plan our upcoming homeschool year. I’m entering my 15th year of homeschooling. I’m so thankful to God for His faithfulness. 😭♥️🌿

Watching… This YouTube channel about Charlotte Mason homeschooling.

Noticing… raindrops on hollyhock buds, endless blue skies, and the way the barn swallows swoop around me when I’m on the mower. Not to mention the smell of freshly cut grass! 🥰🥰🥰

How ‘bout you? What are you listening to, reading, watching, and noticing? ♥️🌿📚😍

•gentle•

Beauty reassures us that goodness is still real in the world, more real than harm or scarcity or evil. Beauty reassures us of abundance, especially that God is absolutely abundant in goodness and in life. Beauty reassures is there is plenty of life to be had. I believe beauty reassures us that the end of this Story is wonderful. The French impressionist Matisse “repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside.”

Beauty is such a gentle grace. Like God, it rarely shouts, rarely intrudes. Rather it woos , soothes, invites; it romances and caresses. We often sigh in the presence of beauty as it begins to minister to us-a good, deep soul-sigh.

John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back, p.33

•most•

Discipline is choosing between what you want now, and what you want most.

Abraham Lincoln, emphasis mine