I arise today with autumn in my soul:
Waters of wisdom.
Graceful aging
Transforming colors
Crunching leaves
Fruitful harvest
Sweet surrender
Life-giving death.
This is my inheritance in this
vibrant new season.
I arise today in the breath of
autumn.
-Macrina Wiederkehr
“Celebration when your plan is working? Anyone can do that. But
when you realize that the story of your life could be told a thousand different
ways, that you could tell it over and over as a tragedy, but you choose to call
it an epic, that's when you start to learn what celebration is. When what you
see in front of you is so far outside of what you dreamed, but you have the
belief, the boldness, the courage to call it beautiful instead of calling it
wrong, that's celebration.” -Shauna Niequist Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life
"Life sneaks up on us every once in a while and gives us
something we didn't ever know we wanted, and lights within us a love we didn't
even know existed.”
-Shauna Niequist Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life
“Nothing good comes easily. You have to lose things you thought you loved, give up things you thought you needed. You have to get over yourself, beyond your past, out from under the weight of your future. The good stuff never comes when things are easy. It comes when things are all heavily weighted down like moving trucks. It comes just when you think it never will, like a shimmering Las Vegas rising up out of the dry desert, sparkling and humming with energy, a blessing that rose up out of a bone-dry, dusty curse.” -Shauna Niequist Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life
"Everything is interim. Everything is a path or a preparation for
the next thing, and we never know what the next thing is. Life is like that, of
course, twisty and surprising. But life with God is like that exponentially. We
can dig in, make plans, write in stone, pretend we're not listening, but the
voice of God has a way of being heard. It seeps in like smoke or vapor even
when we've barred the door against any last-minute changes, and it moves us to
different countries and different emotional territories and different ways of
living. It keeps us moving and dancing and watching, and never lets us drop
down into a life set on cruise control or a life ruled by remote control. Life
with God is a dancing dream, full of flashes and last-minute exits and
generally all the things we've said we'll never do. And with the surprises
comes great hope.”
"The middle is messy, but it’s also where the magic happens.
" — Brene Brown.
“Life with God at its core is about giving your life up to something bigger and more powerful. It’s about saying at every turn that God knows better than we know, and that his Spirit will lead us in ways that we couldn’t have predicted."
-Shauna Niequist Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life
"There's no place like home." -Wizard of Oz
"Every life tells a story, through words and actions and choices,
through our homes and our children, through our clothes and dishes and perfume.
We each play a character in a grand drama, and every stage direction matters.
We tell our stories, and we let God’s story be told through our stories. We hide and we seek, and we lose
ourselves in the best possible way, and find things around us and inside
ourselves that we never expected. We tell God’s story as we live and discover
our own. We know that God is a storyteller. He’s a mad scientist and a father
and a magician, and certainly, he’s a storyteller. And I don’t know if there’s
anything better in the world than when we lay ourselves wide open and let his
story become our story, when we screw up our fists and out courage and start to
tell the truest, best stories we know, which are always God’s stories."
“True friendship is a sacred, important thing, and it happens
when we drop down into that deeper level of who we are, when we cross over into
the broken, fragile parts of ourselves. We have to give something up in order
to get friendship like that. We have to give up our need to be perceived as
perfect. We have to give up our ability to control what people think of us. We
have to overcome the fear that when they see the depths of who we are, they’ll
leave. But what we give up is nothing in comparison to what this kind of friendship
gives to us. Friendship is about risk. Love is about risk. If we can control it
and manage it and manufacture it, then it’s something else, but if it’s really
love, really friendship, it’s a little scary around the edges.”
One
of Katherine's bridesmaids offered a prayer at the bridesmaid's luncheon on Thursday and read
Psalm 23. I am so grateful for the wedding festivities celebrating the Lord as our shepherd
guiding us to this special time. What a gift that we could enjoy this lavish
table set for us and the feast prepared for us in this amazing celebration of
grace and faithfulness for Katherine and Neal...
Trick or Treat!!
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