Maggie ✨

“Thank you God for loving me, and for sending your son to die for my sins. I sincerely repent of my sins and receive Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. Now as your child, I turn my entire life over to you. Amen.”
― Jan Karon, In This Mountain

“Astronomy was history, because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself. When you look at the red star Antares in the Southern sky, you are looking over 3300 trillion miles away. But you are also looking more than 550 years into the past. Antares is so far away that its light takes 550 years to reach your eye on Earth. 550 lightyears away. So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star IS time. And yet, most of the stars have been there for so long, burning so bright, that every human generation could have looked up and seen them. When you gaze up at the sky and you see Antares with its reddish hue in the middle of the constellation Scorpius, you are looking at the same star the Babylonians cataloged as early as 1100 BCE. To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“She kissed his cheek, then drew back and looked at him, sobered. ‘Forgive me. We have so much to be thankful for, yet I allow the vagaries of this good life to overwhelm me. You never seem to be overwhelmed.’
‘I can’t believe that you have lived with me for seven and a half years, and can say that with a straight face.’
‘Alright then. But you handle it better.’
‘You handle it just fine, Cavanaugh. Our Lord himself had to get away from the vagaries of life.”
― Jan Karon, Light from Heaven

“I always had the top grade in the class, and I would come home and brag about how I helped this boy who sat next to me who was struggling with times tables, or I helped this girl with her spelling. Then one day, this boy joins our class, and he is really good at math. Not as good as me, but almost, and he asks me for help. And I told him I’d think about it, but… I didn’t want to. Bobby Simpson. I was so scared that he’d take the top score from me. I told my mom that I wasn’t going to help him, and my mom said that if I was going to be proud of myself for being generous, that I had to do it even when it meant I might lose something. She said ‘You have to have something on the line for it to be called character.’”
Vanessa looked at her. Joan shrugged. “Maybe that’s you. Character when it counts.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere