Hailey Gursoy > Recent Status Updates

Lesson 1: pp. 3-26, 34-41

This is a sweet book so far. I like the relationship between Mona and her grandfather, or ‘Dadé’ as she calls him. Her grandfather gives an interesting commentary on each painting. I enjoyed his reflection on “The Beautiful Gardener.” Curious to see how the author fleshes out Mona’s story with such a repetitive plot structure.

“How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him still,
The dear Christ enters in.”

“If God loves and accepts you as a sinner, how can you do less? You can never be other than who you are until you are willing to embrace the reality of who you are. Only then can you truly become who you are most deeply called to be.”

“In all of creation, identity is a challenge only for humans. A tulip knows exactly what it is. It is never tempted by false ways of being. Nor does it face complicated decisions in the process of becoming. So it is with dogs, rocks, trees, stars, amoebas, electrons and all other things. All give glory to God by being exactly what they are. For in being what God means them to be, they are obeying him.”

“There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding… if you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.”

“People didn’t have to provide for themselves the way they once did. It was a loss- there was nothing like chicken droppings to make flowers thrive.”

“I often find that when God doesn’t answer a prayer, he wants to expose something in me. Our prayers don’t exist in a world of their own. We are in dialogue with a personal, divine Spirit who wants to shape us as much as he wants to hear us. For God to act unthinkingly with our prayers would be paganism, which says the gods do our will in response to our prayers.”

“All the best things in life require an unfolding, a deepening as we commit to them. We’re so used to experiencing wonder through novelty that our romance, our religion, our friendships are tainted by some desperate need for freshness. But the best things are wonderful by familiarity; they inspire awe by intimacy…”

Stakes and tensions are high.

Here we go again.

SARAH YOU GENIUS

“So much as we see the love of God, so much shall we delight in him, and no more. Every other discovery of God, without this, will but make the soul fly from him; but if the heart be once much taken up with this the eminence of the Father’s love, it cannot choose but be overpowered, conquered, and endeared unto him… If the love of a father will not make a child delight in him, what will?” (John Owen)

“If you plunge down only a little into self-despair, you will rise only a little into joyous growth in Christ. “The index of the soundness of a man’s faith in Christ l,” writes J.I. Packer, “is the genuineness of the self-despair from which it springs.”

“To the degree that we minimize the evil within, we lower the ceiling on how deeply we can grow…The severity of our condition dictates the depth and seriousness of the medicine we know we need. If you view your sinfulness as a bothersome headache more than a lethal cancer, you will see tepid growth, if any. You won’t see yourself as needing to grow all that much.”

Love the way this book opens up, reminding us of who Jesus is.

“You are on the right track now: getting to the real Man behind all the plaster dolls that have been substituted for Him. This is the appearance in Human form of the God who made the Tiger and the Lamb, the avalanche and the rose. He’ll frighten you and puzzle you: but the real Christ can be loved and admired as the doll can’t.”

Beach read this past weekend

Really enjoying this book so far! A lot of great food for thought. Good argument for why believers should be mindful of the way we see and identify with other believers. Recognizing one another as brothers and sisters proclaims the Gospel of reconciliation!

So far, enjoying this more than I expected. Lowkey forgot about Yrene… SJM is great at managing all the different threads in her stories (from characters to plot points to world lore…) and does a good job bringing them together in meaningful ways. I already know how this book ends but curious to see how it all plays out.

“All creatures of our God and King
Lift up your voice and with us sing
Alleluia
Alleluia”

Such a random, brief interaction but sweet nonetheless :)

“This world of misery is in dire need of some natural wonder to learn secrets to life from.”