Ellen's Digital Notepad

"they came to sit and dangle their feet off the edge of the world.... and after a while they forgot everything but the good and true things they would do some day"

[ellenheart]

We're keeping busy

We're bleeding stones

Our machinations and our palindromes

Anything but hear a voice

That says that we are basically alone

[ellenheart]

Two women looked through prison bars

One saw mud, the other saw stars.

[ellenheart]

“A good story makes you thankful to be alive because it reminds you that while sometimes painful, life is indeed beautiful and even magical.” ― Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

[ellenheart]

“He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.” ― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

[ellenheart]

“We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.” ― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

[ellenheart]

“Imagine, a Being with a mind as great as God's, with feet like trees and a voice like rushing wind, telling you that you are His cherished creation.” ― Donald Miller

[ellenheart]

“I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made fo figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.” ― Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road

[ellenheart]

“I'll tell you how the sun rose A ribbon at a time... It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be. So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification. And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?” ― Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road

[ellenheart]

“No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath... We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?" ― Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

[ellenheart]

“And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man's weak praise should be given God's attention.” ― Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road

[ellenheart]

“I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze.” ― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

[ellenheart]

“And what you thought you came for Is only a shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured And is altered in fulfilment.

There are other places Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws, Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city — But this is the nearest, in place and time, Now and in England.”

- T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), excerpt from Little Gidding in “Four Quartets”

[libraryofbrokenhearts]

[ellenheart]

“No one gives grace better than [the one] who humbly admits that he desperately needs it himself.”.

-Paul David Tripp

[ellenheart]

“Anyone can be angry, that is easy…

But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way…

This is not easy”

-ARISTOTLE

[ellenheart]

"So much of our unhappiness comes from comparing our lives, friendships, loves, commitments, duties, bodies, and sexuality to some idealized and non-Christian vision of things which falsely assures us that there is heaven on earth. When that happens, and it does, our tensions begin to drive us mad, in this case to a cancerous restlessness."

- Ronald Rolheiser

[ellenheart]

“As parents, we owe it to our children to help them learn how to deal with criticism now in preparation for the inevitable day when it is not delivered as gently as we — or they — would like it. The first step in doing so is backward — away from our natural tendency to step in and make them feel better.”

-Kay Wills Wilma, “Cleaning House — A Mom’s Twelve Month Experiment to Rid Her Home of Youth Entitlement”