We must not measure the reality of love by feelings, but by results. Feelings are very delusive. They often depend on mere natural temperament, and the devil wrests them to our hurt. A glowing imagination is apt to seek itself rather than God. But if you are earnest in striving to serve and endure for God’s sake, if you persevere amid temptation, dryness, weariness, and desolation, you may rest assured that your love is real.
Rapid I have moved along the byways of the world, for my time was not yet. Not so much like King David in the wilderness, before he was king, but not someone either who will come to nothing in the end, I think. I can hope. More than hope, for he who makes his future can best foretell what is to come: these the paths I blaze I know not if anyone has ever passed this way before, the road is rough and unkept. Sometimes to rest, look around me, just where I might be, not really to know until later that I had been in famous places, at times. This is the life I have chosen for myself, and I lament not that it takes me any length to achieve my destination. The journey may not be the reward at the end itself, ’tis true, but one must make delight of even a hard voyage. What else can we do? This is what life is, after all. Count it all joy.
Night falls, where serendipity has a home in the careful darkness.
Night falls, time that stands still, yet things happening everywhere.
Night falls, these little dooms we have grown used to, and ignore.
Night falls, and I light a candle by which to see myself, and wonder.
Night falls, dreams to intrude, entering the world through our hands.
Night falls, and I hold steady for a time, not to buckle before dawn.
Night falls, and nothing exists, and we are all ghosts in a ghost world.
Flyin’ to Seattle when I heard the news.
I can’t believe you’re gone, not the light I knew.
Some things get lost, some things just disappear,
But not my love for you, I’ll keep that close and near.
Some things just fade like scars and dreams,
I’ve got your heart right here with me.
I dialed your number on the phone yesterday,
Thinkin’ you would answer, and then I remembered.
– Alice Peacock
fade in the everlasting night, and the haunting moonglow
we have forgotten our names, echo only what the wind whispers
the candles here hold our very souls in their flickering flames
Where I dream, there are no stars, for not any of any world has yet to discover where it is. I imagine that other places like this exist, for there have been many travelers throughout the cosmos who go so alone as this. My stomach becomes something like a strange, sickly feeling, that when I conceive of certain things, these themselves are so unthought, almost unthinkable in their newness. It is like a sense of danger. But what can I do but go forth, where the small lights lead? The point of turning back there never was; I was committed from the first step — even if I was unaware that there was no return, then. Here, the sky waits for me to fly up, and punch holes where the light may enter, for the stars to shine for the first upon these new lands. For the discovery to prove true, that a new world can be opened to the old.
Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life; meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God’s goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new-created upon your account: and under the sense of so great a blessing, let your joyful heart praise and magnify so good and glorious a Creator.
Night falls, like death, but not as so quiet, after all.
Night falls, room for wanderlust to spill into the bones.
Night falls, desire that overcomes me now awakening.
Night falls, darkness like a negative entity, more than alone.
Night falls, but even the endless black is not so endless.
Night falls, this world of form more like the primordial chaos.
Night falls, stark awake and slouching toward a dream.
as if i’d gotten somewhere
my mind, swimming like against the tide
(the whole time, dreaming like the moon)
i saw her, and evaporated
awakened from some ancient wondering
nonexistent but when she looked
to say how i instantaneously believed
all those existential interruptions of this
life, beginning like it was real
quests, how meaningless
myself, finding of which unnecessary
did i ever think some other way than this?
as if i’d gotten somewhere
my mind, swimming like against the tide
(the whole time, dreaming like the moon)
i saw her, and evaporated
You said you’d realized in life that chances pass you by,
And what you thought was yours, slowly fades before your eyes.
And part of growin’ up, is that you can’t go back in time.
You have to live with your regrets, the things you leave behind.
And we agreed to be the best of friends.
“Let’s talk real soon, I gotta go” you said.
Some things get lost, some things just disappear,
But not my love for you, I’ll keep that close and near.
Some things just fade like scars and dreams,
I’ve got your heart right here with me.
– Alice Peacock
I think I have written about this before, but something made me feel it today: there are saints among us. They hide in plain sight, neither attracting attention nor shunning it, and so look like the rest of we mere mortals. They quietly do this good deed and that, mostly small, for these are the things that come about in everyday life, generally speaking. And in so doing, they invisibly make this world a better place to live. Also, I may conjecture that if and when some great strife is thrown down from the heavens, they will do remarkable things. Of course, these great acts are generally forgotten very quickly, and in fact, their anonymity is usually only altered in a small way. I think, too, that many of them do not even know that they are the saints that they are, and would laugh heartily if one accused them of such a thing. It makes me glad that these people exist, and somewhere in me, I can feel them out there. As if they don’t know that they aren’t yet in Heaven, and assume everyone is really an angel.
A few things (it’s just the one, really) that I feel I need to get off my chest.
One can only pray that he understand the Bible, the best he can. For to understand it at all is to interpret it in some way — saying one takes the Book literally says nothing. Worse, that his interpretation is the only one. And no one in existence follows all the laws it prescribes to their letter: who was the last to stone their neighbor for not keeping the sabbath? And those who say that they only follow the spirit laid down by our Lord, Jesus Christ; shall we not forget the only two things He told us to do, that the only commandments were to love God, with all the heart, mind and soul; and to love one another as He loved us? When, do I ask, did He ever go about persecuting those who are called “sinners� Yet, how many times do those who sit in their high seats decry those such as the homosexuals — for to call anyone a sinner, in the formula left us, these are the ones with whom Christ would have sat with at dinner.
Things like evolution vs. creationism: those who would have no part in the actual science: should he not merely say, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and be done with it? For we should remember that the true prophet will say that, “God spoke to me, a sinner,†while the self-righteous will say, “When we speak, God agrees.†[from: Joy Davidman] How much so is the latter true to those who will say that they know what the Bible truly says? For the truest thing any of us can say is that he doesn’t know. He who holds that is morality is better than the next man: this is the fallacy of the Pharisee: for in the time that our Lord walked, the authorities then had such a manner of thinking. And when those who believe that he does a greater good by committing some smaller crime (or so he believes): let us remember that this was the logic by which our Lord Himself came to be crucified. Let us never forget such things.
I can hope you would have strong feelings about this, one way or another.
He prays well who is so absorbed with God that he does not know he is praying.
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