Emily > Recent Status Updates

Fun to listen to!

“I never let myself feel uncomfortable long enough to have a spiritual connection.”

“Acting came naturally to me. Why wouldn’t I want to be a different person?”

“I'm not saying there aren't bad mothers, she says. Just that you don't always know. What makes them do something, or not do something. Most of us, we're trying our best.”

“The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”

“I have told myself for so many years that my career fell apart because I wasn’t any good. But now I’m starting to think it all fell apart because I had ceased to be brave.”

Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

Tozer says that there are two schools of thought, (1) that Jesus came to help us be the best we can be and (2) that Jesus came to help us put an end to our “self” and replace it with a new self in Jesus. I think the truth is in the middle. I believe that Jesus wants us to be the best version of ourselves so that we can live life to the fullest, but that version is only realized through knowing Jesus.

We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow.

"How long have you been together?"
"Since I was nineteen."
Julia thought about the question for a long time before finally ask-ing: "How do you do it?"
Anna-Lena replied without thinking at all: "You love each other until you can't live without each other. And even if you stop loving each other for a little while, you can't ... you can't live without each other."

“Is it worth being able to say what you need to say, if it means you land in prison?”

I reread the beginning as I was having trouble keeping track of all the pieces. It is still a bit confusing but I did miss some things that a reread helped.

…this page, he says, “and all the natural things, like eating, drinking, buying, selling, marrying – all the things that God created to be done that are not of the spirit of the world, but our natural and of God- will all be sanctified. They will become fuel for the fires of the altar of God. So the common things… will no longer be secular to us. The mundane things will be …heavenly.”

I’m not always tracking with Tozer’s point. For example, on this page he says, “ I have noticed that all you have to do is add for God, or for Jesus, onto a thing, and, lo and behold, that which the church has repudiated, and Earnest Christians have for years, forsaken suddenly becomes sanctified.” But then on…

“Every education brings a point of reckoning, and this was his: seeing the world divided in two camps, the investigators and the sweeteners.”

I’ve moved to StoryGraph!

The earth gives away for free the power of wind and sun and water, but instead we break open the earth to take fossil fuels. Had we taken only that which is given to us, had we reciprocated the gift, we would not have to fear our own atmosphere today.

We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words.
Language is our gift and our responsibility. I've come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit back together to nurture our becoming people made of corn.

Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair.
Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.

We are all complicit. We've allowed the "market" to define what we value so that the redefined common good seems to depend on profligate lifestyles that enrich the sellers while impoverishing the soul and the earth.