Good Work Well Done

“The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables…Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade–not outside of it… The only Christian work is good work well done.”

Dorothy Sayers

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Two Quotes About Being Original

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

C.S. Lewis

“Do not try to be original, but be content to take of the things of Christ, and show them to the people; for that is what the Holy Ghost himself does; and you will be wise to use his method and his sword.”

Spurgeon

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Few Better Quotes About Books Than This One

We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.

–Cory Doctorow

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Men of Grit

We saw Into the Storm last night, a myopic of Churchill during WWII. It closed quietly with these words:

In War: Resolution.

In Defeat: Defiance.

In Victory: Magnanimity.

In Peace: Goodwill.

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Isn’t It Love?

As the modern poet hath written and sung…

And when I think about that prodigal son,
I’ve got to smile when I see the old man run.
And I know that You love us the same,
‘Cause the sun came up today;
Just as if we deserved it –
Just as if any one of us fools was worth it;
Truth is that we’ll never be perfect, but You love us just the same.

I’ve been having a hard time getting away from these lines.

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When Books Stay Closed, You Don’t Get to Read What’s Inside

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Philosophy of Kids

We’ve had the joy of heaps of time in our home over the past three weeks with some of our favorite people. We have 4 boys and a girl. They have 4 girls and a boy. The oldest kid is 8. Eight of the kids are 5 and under. The 14 of us have a raucous time, punctuated by tickles, baby laughs and bumps/bruises and “when are we going to eat?”

When quiet adult talk can happen in the very late hours of the night, it’s easy to spend the time speaking of parenting issues, analyzing and examining issues we are facing, seeking sharpening, and reflecting on the labor and joys of our tasks and preparing for what is coming. Privately we perhaps are free to especially speak of the difficulties [read as: "overwhelming exhaustion"] of raising so many young children (all at once).

These words from John Piper are a balm to us. Here is an impromptu response to the common, secular “kids will kill the planet” talk that is common in the world,

“The kids I’m going to raise are going to lift a million burdens. Christian, you’ve got to believe that bringing kids into the world and being brought up in the Lord, makes them burden-lifters not burden-adders. They are in the world to lift the world, to save the world, to love the world. You’re not just adding dead weight to the world when you bring a child up in the Kingdom. You’re bringing up lovers of people and servants of the world.”

Source video

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Thanksgiving Meditation

Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many, yea in some sort to our whole nation;  let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise. – William Bradford

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First Things First

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

George Orwell

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How to Argue

Making a case is one thing. Making a convincing case is something else entirely. Convincing yourself of something you sense is true isn’t very hard, but convincing someone else is. It makes you think harder about what you believe and why you believe it. And sometimes that alone will help you see the other side — and maybe even change your mind.

Jason Fried, Inc. Magazine, Managing Conflict

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Watching TV Has Its Benefits

Watching TV has its benefits. It excuses you from the responsibility of having an informed opinion about things that matter. It gives you shallow opinions or false ‘facts’ that you can easily parrot to others that watch what you watch. It rarely unsettles our carefully self-induced calm and isolation from the world.

Read the whole article by Seth Godin, Deliberately Uninformed

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The Nature of Abundant Blessings

Not above some things that we ask, but all.  Not above some of our dimmer conceptions, our lower thoughts, but above all that we think.  Now just put together all that you have ever asked for.  Heap it up, and then pile upon the top thereof all that you have ever thought of concerning the riches of divine grace.  What a mountain! . . . High as this pyramid of prayers and contemplations may be piled, God’s ability to bless is higher still.

C.H. Spurgeon on Ephesians 3:20

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Why Do YOU Work?

Are you building a wall or a cathedral?

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

–Antoine De Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince

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The Bare Truth About a Dad’s Necessary Balancing Act

This in fact is true strength: to be strong as iron when confronting problems and difficulties, and not to yield in the face of pressure; to follow through on our words and restrain our children when it is needed. And yet also be to strong enough within ourselves to open up and play with our children, and let them be close to us. It’s not an overabundance of strength that prevents fathers being gentle, caring and intimate with their children. Often it is the deeply insecure man, the man whose soul is weak and fragile, who cannot open up to a child, be silly with them, praise them openly, and hug them affectionately.

Tony Payne, Fatherhood: What It Is and What It’s For, p. 90

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All the Good You Can

Christians are to be eager and enthusiastic in dreaming up ways to do good for others. We are to not just to do good when the opportunity comes to us—although we are to do it then, also—but we are to think hard about ways we can be proactive in serving people. And we are to do this because we are excited about it and because we love to, rather than begrudgingly.

Matt Perlman writing for Desiring God, Christians Are to be Proactive in Doing Good

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I Thought of My Grandpa Today

I’m listening to a biography of Harry Truman by David McCullough. I’m only about 10% in to the story and am enjoying it.

This quote means little to the whole of the book, but it grabbed me hard today with past implications–and future implications of the grandpa I am becoming.

With such a grandfather a boy could hardly imagine himself a nobody.

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What Makes A Good Preacher

“A good preacher should have these qualities and virtues: first, to teach systematically; second, he should have a ready wit; third, he should be eloquent; fourth, he should have a good voice; fifth, a good memory; sixth, he should know when to make an end; seventh, he should be sure of his doctrine; eighth, he should venture and engage body and blood, wealth and honour, in the world; ninth, he should suffer himself to be mocked and jeered of everyone.”

Martin Luther via George Grant

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The Health of a Nation Is Known By the State of Its Women

From all that I have read of history of government, of human life, and manners, I [have] drawn this conclusion, tha the manners of women [are] the most infallible barometer, to ascertain the degree of morality and virtue in a nation. All that I have since read and all the observation I have made in different nations, have confirmed me in this opinion. The manners of women, are the surest criterion by which to determine whether a republican government is practicable, in a nation or not. The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the Swiss, the Dutch, all lost their public spirit, their republican principles and habits when they lost the modest and domestic virtues of their women…

The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families. In vain are schools, academies and universities instituted if loose principles and licentious habits are impressed upon children in their earliest years. The mothers are the earliest and most important instructors of youth.

– John Adams (from Bringing Up Girls, p. 38, James Dobson)

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A Life Well-Lived Should End Like This

No other success in life–not being President, or being wealthy, or going to college, or anything else–comes up to the success of the man and woman who feel they have done their duty and that their children and grandchildren rise up to call them blessed.

–Theodore Roosevelt

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Imitation in Life

Education is a complex transfer of the habits, customs, rituals, sayings, stories, values, morals, songs, and jokes of the teacher to the students until the students are walking around looking, sounding, and acting like their teacher.

Read the rest of this wonderful article from Credenda/Agenda on Learning to Teach

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Is It Important to Travel?

Mark Twain thought so…

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Innocents Abroad

So did C.S. Lewis. He called our snootiness about our own way “provincial snobbery.”

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Where Do You Fit in the Story?

Christians are a race of dragon fighters. Our sons are born to this. Someone ought to tell them.

– Douglas Wilson, Future Men

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What Faith Doesn’t Mean

Faith in Jesus does not guarantee that everything will go our way…. As Bible commentator Bruce Waltke has pointed out, Abel had faith and he died; Enoch had faith and he did not die; Noah had faith and everyone else died.

– Kevin DeYoung, Just Do Something, p. 29

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Happy Birthday, Thomas Chalmers…(and Abi Farmer)

What a wonderful old man Chalmers is. Or rather, he has all the buoyancy of youth. When so many of us are wringing our hands in hopeless despair over the vileness and wretchedness of the large towns, there goes the old man, shovel in hand, down into the dirtiest puddles, cleans them out, and fills the sewers with living waters. It is a beautiful sight.

– Thomas Carlyle

Brief bio by George Grant

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Vittles

Hockey Fever

A chart showing water consumption during the gold medal Olympic game.

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In Defense of Food

“You now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a 1940 apple, and you’d have to eat several more slices of bread to get your recommended daily allowance of zinc than you would have a century ago.”

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Grooveshark

Live stream full-length custom songs and albums and make your own playlists. This is different from LaLa and Pandora and the others. I use it every day.

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Hot Brown at the Brown Hotel

If I were in the market for a $20 breakfast, I would so be here when I spend three days in Louisville next month.

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You Know that Chair You’re Sitting in Isn’t Really Real, Don’t You?

I write kids’ books because I can tell the Truth, and the Truth is that The Real is throbbingly fantastic. Ask the nearest grasshopper or rodent or turtle. Ask the nearest star (but show some respect and don’t look directly at her—she’s powerful enough to peal your nose and blind your eyes). I want to paint a picture of this world that is accurate (if impressionistic), and I don’t want a single young reader to grow up and look back on me as the peddler of sweet youthful falsehoods. I want them to get a world vision that can grow and mature and age with them until, like all exoskeletons, it must be cast aside—not as false, but as a shallow introduction to things even deeper and stranger and more wonderful (and involving more dragonflies).

Nate Wilson teaches me to love reality…and to see it more clearly. I’ve said this before here. This is a portion of a great article you should read…now. Children’s Books, Truth and Adultish Readers

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Rikki-tikki-tavi

We listened to Rikki-tikki-tavi in the van on the way home from Michigan. It’s only about 40 minutes and is available online to read or hear for free by easy searching. Some of the simplest, funnest words ever to come from a British pen:

It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is ‘Run and find out.’

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Mulling What Was Never Considered

Our family this week watched the first of the six episodes of Ken Burn’s National Parks: America’s Best Idea. It’s a beautiful and moving history, tribute and call to the value and nature of the National Park System. I’m hungry for more and sure I’ll bring you deeper in as we go. The first disc (“The Scripture of Nature”) begins with this quote by John Muir:

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul.”

and ends with this stirring piece that you should spend some time chewing on:

The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease. Briskly venturing and roaming, some are … jumping from rock to rock, feeling the life of them, learning the songs of them, panting in whole-souled exercise and rejoicing in deep, long-drawn breaths of pure wildness.

John Muir, Atlantic Monthly, 1898

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Promise?

Those who are quick to promise are generally slow to perform. They promise mountains and perform molehills. He who gives you fair words and nothing more feeds you with an empty spoon. People don’t think much a man’s piety when his promises are like pie crust: made to be broken.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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Idea with Heft

We are simple people. You can’t remember ten things at once. Invariably, if you could remember just ONE true thing in the moment of trial, you’d be different. Bible ‘verses’ aren’t magic. But God’s words are revelations of God from God for our redemption. When you actually remember God, you do not sin. The only way we ever sin is by suppressing God, by forgetting, by tuning out his voice, switching channels, and listening to other voices. When you actually remember, you actually change. In fact, remembering is the first change.

– David Powlinson

HT: Take Your Vitamin Z

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