Maggie ✨

“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

“He remembered Mrs. Sadie’s story of falling into the abandoned well, of her terror as she cried out unheard in the dark summer night, and unable to move. She said she’d known for the first time the deep meaning of the prayers she had learned by rote. ‘It was the darkness,’ Mrs. Sadie had told him. ‘That was the worst.’ The tears were hot on his face. His own life seemed overwhelmed by darkness these last weeks. There had been the bright and shining possibility, then had come the crushing darkness. Something flickered in his memory. ‘Songbirds,’ he whispered. ‘Songbirds. Yes. Are taught to sing in the dark.’ That was a line from Oswald Chambers from the book he’d kept by his bedside for many years… He thumbed through the worn and familiar pages. There, page 45, the reading for February 14th. ‘At times, God puts us through the discipline of darkness to teach us to heed him. Songbirds are taught to sing in the dark, and we are put into the shadow of God’s hand until we learn to hear him. Watch where God puts you into darkness, and when you are there, keep your mouth shut. Are you in the dark just now in your circumstances, or in your life with God? Then remain quiet. When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message for someone else when you get into the light.”
― Jan Karon, In This Mountain

“He prayed the prayer attributed to Saint Francis: “Watch, O Lord, with those who wake or watch or weep tonight, and give your angels and saints charge over those who sleep. Tend your sick ones, O Lord Christ. Rest your weary ones. Bless your dying ones. Soothe your suffering ones. Pity your afflicted ones. Shield your joyous ones. And all for your love’s sake, Amen,” they said. He took her hand, and they lay quiet, the clock ticking on the mantel.
“I’m always moved by his petition to ‘shield your joyous ones,’” she said at last. “By his recognition that joy is a terribly fragile thing, and the enemy is bent on stealing it from us. Such a wise thing to ask for.”
― Jan Karon, Light from Heaven

“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