Wednesday, May 27, 2015


This piece speaks about those who are sensitive to the things in this life and learn from them and walk in deeper faith because of it. It is such an encouragement for me to slow down to see and hear God in all of life. 

  " There are some to whom the tearful atmosphere of this world early brings the dew and sprinkling of regeneration; and to whom, thenceforth, no event is simply physical, no experience chiefly external; but an inner fire takes up and kindles whatever is offered, and is sure to be nurtured by it into a purer and diviner flame. To such souls every element of life is sacred, and every momentary change is rich; and the transient brush of sunshine that but touches the grass and flits away, will show them more than the longest and the most staring summer-day can give to the shrewd open eye. Whatever passes before them becomes a part of them: their tablet of the past is not the memorandum-book of business and affairs, but the illuminated calendar of the affections, where the names are holy and the days are bright. The legends they have to tell are not superficial anecdotes that fools can understand as well as wise; but snatches from the great drama of reality, a chorus flung out from its chords of joy or grief, moving and significant to those only who know it as a whole.

Where there is in the soul this living mood of watchfulness and response, it needs no large knowledge to give the finest wisdom, no length of days to enrich the heart with the deepest experience. Let the mind be only pure and tender with the love of God, large with his presence, and free in the quietude of faith, and its faculties move upon the slightest hint, and find more in an ordinary year than sharp-sightedness and sound-headedness alone could discern from beneath their knitted brows in half a century." James Martineau.  

Monday, May 25, 2015


The following quote about our thoughts of loved-ones that have died is so insightful and tender, written by Washington Irving.

“The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. Where is the mother who would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang? Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portal, would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness? No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise its delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection, when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved are softened away in pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness - who would root out such a sorrow from the heart? Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gaiety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure, or the burst of revelry? No, there is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song. There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living. Oh, the grave! The grave! It buries every error - covers every defect - extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections.” 


Thursday, May 21, 2015


The Rainy Day

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the moldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

 My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the moldering past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

Henry W. Longfellow.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015



The following piece is about how, among the many things we need in life, experience can be very valuable, but for some of us, it seems as if we never learn from it, and as time marches on we find ourselves unchanged by it.
We lack a sensitivity to draw from experience the elements that would make another person more sympathetic, compassionate, patient and wise. Instead of maturing, as the changes of life and time pass by, we lack the intuition or wisdom to draw from events the very things that build character. The following piece (which has to be read more than once) is about that very phenomenon. How experience is valuable but only if we have ---

"some breadth of ability and faculty to seize relations, and the depth of conscience to read life truly, and quickness of affection to sympathize with it more fully; and a cultivated reverence of mind to know its own ignorance and find the way to other's wisdom.
The materials and occasions of experience may often abound; and yet may remain without change and moral result, because they lack the living mind and molding love to elaborate and shape them. Some men there are whom no lapse of time seems to soften or expand; from whom whole floods of experience will flow off and leave them dry; who pass through events and remember them, and like to call back their outward image again, but are just the same as if the events had been different; who reproduce in age the very sentiments and prejudices they had looked up in youth, and gather nothing from the past but a mood disagreeable and un-genial to the present. They repeat the story of their early days, not as a poem, but as an almanac; they can give you the dates but not the meaning of the changes they have seen; and of the men they have admired they can tell no more than the register and the coffin-plate. To such natures, case-hardened against the elements, time and the seasons come in vain: winter and summer pass but not a crevice opens in the rock where a green thing can push its root. Lacking the susceptibility to appropriate what is given and work it up into the organism of the personal existence, they can only by an abuse of terms be said to have "experience" at all: they lack its diviner conditions, though supplied with its natural variations and changes; if they were to live life over again, they would do and be essentially the same." James Martineau.


Monday, May 18, 2015


I have an old book titled  "Golden thoughts of Mother, Home and Heaven". It was published in 1881 and is earmarked for my Granddaughter Destiny. When it was written they asked Fanny Crosby, blind from age two months: a prolific songwriter with over 9,000 hymns as well as hundreds of poems and best known for "Blessed Assurance”., Fanny was asked if she would write a poem expressly for this book, here it is ----

Mother
  
The light, the spell-word of the heart,
Our guiding star in weal or woe,
Our talisman --- our earthly chart ---
That sweetest name that earth can know.

We breathed it first with lisping tongue
When cradled in her arms we lay;
Fond memories round that name are hung
That will not, cannot pass away.

We breathed it then, we breathe it still,
More dear than sister, friend, or brother
The gentle power, the magic thrill,
Awakened at the name of mother.

Some of us are blessed to have fond memories and a deep abiding love for Mother; would that it were true for all......