Category Archives: Good lines

Stuff I’ve heard and want to remember

Check Your Attitude

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What is the source of the wars and the fights among you? Don’t they come from the cravings that are at war within you? You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and don’t receive because you ask wrongly, so that you may spend it on your desires for pleasure.

James 4:1-3

Holman Christian Standard Version

This was our passage in Sunday School this morning. The discussion went something like this:

“Now, I can’t imagine any of us actually murdering because we couldn’t get something.”

“But there’s that passage where Jesus equates anger with murder, and I can see any of us getting angry about not getting something we want. Seeing things other people have and we don’t.”

“Not just things. There’s sleep, time.”

“Children.”

“Travel.”

“And, really, this passage is very clear why we don’t have what we want: ‘You do not have because you do not ask,’ (makes me think of an earlier blog post) or ‘You ask and don’t receive because you ask wrongly, so that you may spend it on your desires for pleasure.’ We just studied last summer that the point of prayer was to bring glory to God, not fulfilling our wants or needs.”

“So if we ask for something for ‘spending on our own pleasures‘ we’re working against the express purpose of prayer, and there should be no surprise it doesn’t work.”

~ ~ ~

Now, I know there are a number of ways and reasons God says “no” to prayers: His will for us, timing, protecting us from what we think we want…

But I think it is good, too, to run our unanswered prayers though this James 4:3 filter and see if we need to be convicted about a wrong attitude in the way or for what we’re asking.

Great exchange from a good book.

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I just finished reading The Light of Eidon, one of the books I got this weekend from the library.

It is an intriguing addition to the world of allegorical fantasy, and pretty well carried off.

In an attempt to share my favorite segment from the book, I have to share the framework of the story, so if you think you wouldn’t guess the spiritual end of the protagonist (Abramm) consider this your spoiler warning.

~ ~ ~

Abramm, known as “The Pretender” for the two years he was a gladiator, is newly converted to the faith of “the dying god,” and faces a 200-year-old warrior king in mortal combat.

With only 1-percent of his opponent’s experience, Abramm knows there is no natural reason he should even survive, much less triumph.

He advances, praying this act of his infant faith really is Eidon’s will.  If it is, Abramm trusts that somehow his God will fight for him.

The king, Beltha’adi, is preternaturally sustained in his prime by the malevolent power that he worships, and obviously considers himself immortal.

The fight is not over swiftly, and surprisingly it is Abramm that lets the first blood.

…only a tiny cut, but Beltha’adi lurched back with a curse. It wasn’t from the pain, but from the indignity of of being the first one blooded– him who had expected not to be blooded at all.

They circled again.

“You’re good Pretender,” Beltha’adi grated, “but you’re only flesh. And flesh isn’t good enough to stand against a god.”

Abramm kept his gaze fixed on Beltha’adi’s.

“No,” he agreed. “It’s not.”

Best line in the whole book (not to diminish the book).

Loved it.

First Lines

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Following Kaye’s lead, I am doing a first-lines post.

Only, to make my list unique (I have seen a number of these floating around in the last few months), I am choosing books I have read that I haven’t seen in a list of first-lines.

Most of mine are from children’s books, as I feel these are woefully under-represented in lists of merit.

Commencing:

Tawny shivered, not understanding this and not liking it because he did not understand.

Desert Dog by Jim Kjelgaard (a last name I still can’t pronounce)

The city was silently bloating in the hot sun, rotting like the thousands of bodies that lay where they had fallen in street battles.

A Voice in the Wind by Francine Rivers

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child anyone had ever seen. It was true, too.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

However perilous and astonishing the exploits of the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society, each separate adventure always started off at a formal General Meeting. (Corporate rules and regulations, order and decorum, provide a solid foundation for individual heroism.)

Miss Bianca by Margery Sharp

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.

Holes by Louis Sachar

Linderwall was a large kingdom, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were respected and the number five was fashionable.

Dealing With Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

“She won’t be angry with me,” said Alicia. “Why should she, Kate? Every word I wrote her was true. This is the most horrible place in the world. You know it is.”

The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope

Long ago a river divided two kingdoms– one great and one small.

The Bridge by Jeri Massi

It was Old Bess, the Wise Woman of the village, who first suspected the baby at her daughter’s house was a changeling.

The Moorchild by Eloise McGraw

 

Lyric

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Though your life may seem to sound a dark and minor key,
It will someday shift itself to major.
And the lyric of your life will rhyme with nothing less than joy…

From a Michael Card song

I love musical metaphors. I don’t often see them.

This is from Poiema, a CD with several *good* songs, that I’ve had since High School. Just was thinking of that last line today.

Lines about Joy always catch my mind.

Folk-Tale Wisdom

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I think one of my favorite lines for myself is from the Russian Cinderella story.

This version has the orphaned daughter (Vasalisa) being helped by a little doll her mother gave her. Every time the evil steps give her some impossible task, Vasalisa pours out her heart to the doll who tells her to rest.

“Morning is Wiser than the evening,” the doll always says.

And, of course, by morning the doll has worked some magic or called some creatures to her girl’s aid, reducing the problem to almost nothing.

So often I find that if I will just give over dwelling on my problem(s) and actually rest, I find the morning really is wiser than the evening– and that is even without magical assistance.

Though, probably not without divine assistance.

Beginning Orthodoxy

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Currently Reading
Orthodoxy
By G. K. Chesterton

Ahhh… Back to my reading list.

I’ve barely got through the introduction and I’m already wishing to quote large chunks of this fellow. He makes me laugh, and I like his analogies.

He reads rather like a blogger, which should be no surprise since he was a journalist and a debater for pleasure. He seems almost (again, like a blogger) to have unrestricted printing access. This makes him very free with word-count and self-amusing asides.

This book, Chesterton says, grew out of a challenge that the last book he wrote was incomplete in its scope.

It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation.

Two things so far have caught my mind.

First, the (every) writer’s reality of rediscovering what (really) is already known,

I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before…. [This book] recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious.

And second, the question for both philosophers and writers:

How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? Continue reading »

Motivation

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Saturday we had our first, long-anticipated, Third-Saturday women’s meeting. We’ve had random events and get-togethers, but now we’re trying to have a regular, monthly, meeting.

While there, Lynn, one of our quiet “older” mothers shared a beautiful memory from her childhood.

Every day, a little before her father would be home, her mother stopped whatever she was doing to prepare for his arrival. She would put on a clean dress, tidy her hair and put on a little make-up.

When the father drove in, Lynn would run to greet him and walk with him up to the house, but there was an unspoken understanding that caused her to step aside when they reached the door where her mother waited.

The husband and wife would embrace, kiss, and her father would look at her mother and say,

“The reason a man works hard all day.”

 

 

Evolutionary Hymn

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Another C.S. Lewis poem I read years ago. I didn’t “get” it at that time, but it’s very thought-provoking now.

Lead us, Evolution lead us
Up the future’s endless stair:
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing
Lead us nobody knows where….

Ask not if it’s god or devil
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and Evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic
Abstract yardsticks we deny.

Far too long have sages vainly
Glossed great Nature’s simple text;
He who runs can read it plainly
“Goodness = what comes next.”
By evolving, Life is solving
All the questions we perplexed.

On then! Value means survival–
Value. If our progeny
Spreads and spawns and licks each rival
That will prove its deity
(Far from pleasant, by our present
Standards, though it well may be).

Callings and Being: a patchwork of thoughts.

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God makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.

C.S. Lewis

I discovered this quote the summer after my freshman year in college, and latched on to it. I still love it.

  • What you do doesn’t determine who you are; who you are determines what you do.
  • No person can consistently live in a manner that is inconsistent with how he perceives himself.

Both from Victory Over the Darkness by Neil Anderson

I know some people take issue with his writings. I also still think these statements are valid.

His [Jesus’s] divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.

2 Peter 1:3

We’re not just hanging on until we go home with the get-out-of- jail-free card he bought us. We have also been equipped to live this life while we’re here. He’s given us everything we need.

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age

Titus 2:11-12

The same grace that called us away from what is destructive also trains us to live a life pleasing to God.

All this is mixed-in with my mis-reading of this post which gave me the great line:

We all have things that He [God] did not give us.

As a multi-talented (multi-interest) person, it is a good reminder. There are things I’m just not meant to do.

And because God’s design has purpose, the not is as much my identity as the doing. Or, so it seems reasonable to assume.

Something to think on, anyway.

Alaskan Snapshot

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My sister sent me this forward under the title, “Forget rednecks…here is what Jeff Foxworthy has to say about Alaskans…

Here were the ones (or their modifications) that rang the most true with me, along with my own.

  • If you’ve worn shorts and a parka at the same time, you may live in Alaska.
  • If someone in a Home Depot store offers you assistance and they don’t work there, you may live in Alaska.
  • If you measure distance in hours, you may live in Alaska.
  • If you know several people who have hit a moose, you may live in Alaska.
  • If you have switched from “heat” to “A/C” in the same day and back again, you may live in Alaska.
  • If you can drive through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard without flinching, you may live in Alaska. Continue reading »