Lee > Recent Status Updates

Over a hundred pages in and only about six hours have passed in the storyline. Very tense.

Now for some high seas adventure

“ we need to remake education so that it includes emotion skills, so that professional interventions become less necessary.”

“ every time, our liturgy unites with the ongoing heavenly banquet, something changes here on earth.”
-Father Gregory

The whole chapter 8 - adopt a no-losers policy - is a brilliant way to make sure your relationships are full of mercy and justice. And it works for any relationship from parent child to friend to spouse to business.

I love that he give the #1 way to practice self-care as receiving God’s love. “To practice good self-care, you must learn to let the love of God and others penetrate. You must allow God’s love to sink into your soul. You must receive.”

Judgement results in defensiveness and closes down relationships, while curiosity results in openness and safety, giving life to relationships.
- that sounds like Jesus’ mode of operation when dealing with hurting people. The woman caught in adultery, the demonized, the paralyzed, all the people who came to him with messy lives received his interest rather than judgment.

uh oh….he actually uses an example where the husband had an affair and blamed it on the wife and Smalley says it was her fault….🤦🏼‍♀️

First published in 1961, this book has a bit of an Agatha Christie feel to it, but with a more subdued thoughtful quality and a good bit of philosophical musing.

He has already quoted from Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, and has directed the reader who desires a relationship with God to go to Appendix A where we find the Sinner’s Prayer along with a list of books for further reading, except the Bible isn’t listed. 🤔🤷🏼‍♀️

Love is….
the music God has written for all His creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his baton.

He mentions E. Powers Biggs in an illustration about gravy - I’d never heard that name and was surprised when I looked it up. Listen to some videos. You will enjoy.

This should end any further argument. Robert capon says “ wash your good knives by hand”

“At communion we are like the children of Israel in the wilderness, tasting fruit plucked from the promised land.”

“ the calorie approach is the work of the devil”

“Baptism is not magic, a conjuring trick with water. But neither is it simply a visual aid. It is one of the points, established by Jesus himself, where heaven and earth interlock, where new creation, resurrection life, appears, within the midst of the old….. the foundational event for all serious Christian living, all dying to sin and coming alive with Christ.”

food, these days is often identified as the enemy. Butter, salt, eggs are all out to get you. Yet at our best, we know better. Butter is butter: it glorifies everything it touches. Salt is the sovereign perfector of all flavors. Eggs are one of the wonders of the world. put them together, you get not sudden death, but hollandaise. In its own way, not a bit less a marvel than the Gothic arch, or a Bach fugue.

“…the thing about Easter is that it is neither ethereal nor esoteric. It’s about the real Jesus coming out of the real tomb and getting God’s real new creation underway.”

“… a glittering new supermarket – anathema to the elderly ladies of St Mary Mead. ‘Packets of things one’s never even heard of’ exclaimed Miss Hartnell. ‘all these great packets of breakfast cereal instead of cooking a child, a proper breakfast of bacon and eggs.’ “

Captivating!

The chapter on prayer is itself alone a reason to read this book.

Already too much in this that is artificially promoting ideologies - when the main character is well known because the best article she’s written is all about the joys of assisted suicide, and the swearing and cursing happen every other sentence - it’s time to flip ahead in the story and see what else is coming and if it’s worth reading.

“He had always been a scornful of root-doctors and all their kind, but now she saw a faker from over around Altamonte Springs, hanging around the place almost daily.”

Probably not the best transition to go from a newly published Baldacci thriller to this slow narrative with phonetically spelled out thick southern accents.

On his genetic predisposition to play baseball as the son of a pro ball player …”Most infants are given milk and Cheerios. I was given Gatorade and sunflower seeds.”

Recently have read about the evils of Private Equity companies and now here is a book where the bad guys are PE firms

Illusory truth effect: the way to get someone to believe a lie is to simply repeat the lie.
Apparently they did a study in 2017 about this. Two years later there sure were a lot of repeated lies weren’t there?

“We are moving away from the old split in which it was expected that good Christians couldn’t be artists and good artists couldn’t be Christians. We now have, thank God, some wonderful Christian painters, composers, sculptors, and even poets who are showing the way forward.”

Scathing comments against American Christian nationalism

“…genuinely anticipating in the present what is to come in the future.”