Megan > Recent Status Updates

He wanted to snarl and spit and say something mean. He wanted his words to scratch. But the priest was watching him, waiting with unblinking firelit eyes. Sam swallowed and let the anger drain out of him, and some of his shame went with it. Stiff arms could make him messy---they had hundreds of times. But they didn't have to make him nasty.

A Goodwill find that was unfamiliar to me. Performed my classical test: flip open to the middle for a sample of writing. I looked up several minutes later to find I was in people's way at the check out line.

Into the cart. 🛒

Chapter 2's two paragraph exposition of middle school malaise made me laugh out loud.

On the democratization of the Spirit--"The internalization of the law signifies the full cooperation of the children of God with the Spirit in living harmoniously with the new order of restoration. The new, regenerated heart of the faithful desires nothing less than to advance God's cause in the world....Restoration depends not on frail human leaders, institutions, or programs, but on the Spirit." p. 125

"We sense, and then we make sense of what we sense."

Re: Hosea

"I am the LORD your God."

He promises himself so that the people of God may know that they may find life in Yahweh alone! Yahweh freely opens up a new era of covenant renewal in which he gave more of himself, deepened his commitment, and made the promises more attractive. Love truly flows out of God's holiness, a holiness that loves and binds rather than repels and separates.

Eschatology is always here.

In the tension between creation and the new creation [God's people] live in faith, awaiting the fullness of salvation. This means that everything is BC and AD. This means that all acts and revelations of God in Old and in New are anno Domini...and that the whole progress of redemption is before the coming (of Christ), that is, the era of climactic fulfillment at his second coming.

Unless something very interesting happens in the next 50 pages, this is going to turn out to be one that I just slogged through in vague, unrealized hope that something profound will happen 🤷🏼‍♀️

Both Jack and Tollers regularly wrote in their correspondence about personal experience of cowardice. I have felt...well, encouraged!--by their vulnerable longings for courage as they felt great fear of loss.

Yet the moral blindness of the twentieth century represented something entirely novel: ideologies that threatened to destroy the foundations of civilized life. Tolkien and Lewis believed that only an outlook rooted in the ancient truths could resist it. "The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds," Lewis wrote, "and this can be done only by reading old books." p.115