Hamewith

a commonplace book for what matters most.

[jyholt-blog]

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; His love endures forever! 1 Chronicles 16:14

[thewordfortheday]

God never abandons His children. In times of danger and distress, He spreads His wings of protection and comfort over us. Under the shadow of His wings, we don’t need to fear the difficult circumstances of life. Storms may rage around us, but we are safe under the canopy of His constant care. The psalmist assures us, “He shall cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you shall take refuge.” (Psalm 91:4)

If you are going through painful times, take refuge under His wings. Take comfort in the fact that God's protection is spread over you. Nothing can touch your life without His permission. Nothing can threaten when He is your Protector.

[wesleyhill]

Now, the word “marriage,” for thousands of years and cross-culturally has meant man and woman. Sometimes it’s been one man and more than one woman. Occasionally it’s been one woman and more than one man. There is polyandry as well as polygamy in some societies in some parts of history, but it’s always been male plus female. Simply to say that you can have a woman-plus-woman marriage or a man-plus-man marriage is radically to change that because of the givenness of maleness and femaleness. I would say that without any particular Christian presuppositions at all, just cross-culturally, that’s so. With Christian or Jewish presuppositions, or indeed Muslim, then if you believe in what it says in Genesis 1 about God making heaven and earth—and the binaries in Genesis are so important—that heaven and earth, and sea and dry land, and so on and so on, and you end up with male and female. It’s all about God making complementary pairs which are meant to work together. The last scene in the Bible is the new heaven and the new earth, and the symbol for that is the marriage of Christ and his church. It’s not just one or two verses here and there which say this or that. It’s an entire narrative which works with this complementarity so that a male-plus-female marriage is a signpost or a signal about the goodness of the original creation and God’s intention for the eventual new heavens and new earth. If you say that marriage now means something which would allow other such configurations, what you’re saying is actually that when we marry a man and a woman we’re not actually doing any of that stuff. This is just a convenient social arrangement and sexual arrangement and there it is … get on with it. It isn’t that that is the downgrading of marriage, it’s something that clearly has gone on for some time which is now poking it’s head above the parapet. If that’s what you thought marriage meant, then clearly we haven’t done a very good job in society as a whole and in the church in particular in teaching about just what a wonderful mystery marriage is supposed to be. Simply at that level, I think it’s a nonsense. It’s like a government voting that black should be white. Sorry, you can vote that if you like, you can pass it by a total majority, but it isn’t actually going to change the reality.

N. T. Wright, quoted here (via wesleyhill)

[browndresswithwhitedots]

In the end, each of us has only one story to tell. Yet despite having lived that story, most people have neither the courage nor any idea of how to tell it.

Jonathan Carroll / The Marriage of Sticks (via browndresswithwhitedots)

[browndresswithwhitedots]

[browndresswithwhitedots]

pinterest.com

[browndresswithwhitedots]

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[jyholt-blog]

hamewith.

[adieu---tristesse-deactivated20]

The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament. The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul. Sweeping up with the waves of those movements, plunging back with them, the heart thus forgets its own failures and finds solace in an intimate harmony between its own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges the sea’s destiny with the destinies of all things.

Marcel Proust, Regrets, Reveries the Color of Time (via frauleinzooey)

this is the first time i have felt even slightly inclined to read proust

(via fluvicoline)

[browndresswithwhitedots]

manyfires

[coconutsmigrating]

Chicago loft

[thomuchistakenmuchabides-deacti]

The Christian should see two realities at once, one world (as it were) within another: one the world as we all know, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish; and the other the world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply “nature” but “creation,” an endless sea of glory, radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once, to regard the world as a mirror of infinite beauty, but as glimpsed through the veil of death; it is to see creation in chains, but beautiful as in the beginning of days.

David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea (via invisibleforeigner)

[wesleyhill]

Does not the cry ‘My God, My God, why have you deserted me?’ convince us that God never leaves us?

Pennar Davies

UPDATE: Perhaps I should say something about why I think this counterintuitive sentence should be answered with a “Yes.”

If God incarnate once joined (Mark 15:34) our (Psalm 22:1) human despair, then we are thereby guaranteed that even in our bleakest hour, He remains present. As the New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham puts it, “On the level of a theological understanding of the cry, it must be that Jesus asks the question, not on his own behalf, but as the question asked by those with whom his use of the words identifies him. It is their protest that he voices on their behalf. This is the fullest meaning of the fact that the words of Jesus’ cry are borrowed from the psalms of lament.”

(via wesleyhill)

[browndresswithwhitedots]

Pane Integrale by Sara on Flickr.

[browndresswithwhitedots]

greg pths

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[onancientpaths]

[The] apostle Paul puts it well: ‘One God and Father of all, who is above all and with all and in all’ (cf Eph 4:6). The Father is ‘above all’, but the Word is ‘with all’, since it is through Him that everything was made by the Father. And ‘in us all’ is the Spirit, who cries ‘Abba, Father’ (cf Gal 4:6), and forms man into the likeness of God.

St Irenaeus (via onancientpaths)