good things are here.
good things are to come.
surprise visits from orlando friends.
neko case show.
wedding in tally.
reunions with tally friends.
a meal of thanks with dear friends.
cooler weather. (crossing my fingers)
long breaks from academia.
and a week spent loving haitian children as best as i can.
16 November 2009
11 November 2009
08 November 2009
maggie: the little bearwolf.
a friend of mine is fostering her until she's old enough to go to the shelter.
i wish i could've taken her home.
i'd really like a dog companion.
maybe next year.
05 November 2009
a good conscience.
saved through water.
baptism.
the pledge of a good conscience toward God.
"healthy contempt for worldly comforts,
burning desire to advance in virtue,
a love of right order in your actions,
a spirit of penance,
readiness to obey authority,
self-discipline,
and patience to bear adversity for My sake."
Lord, i don't know anything.
except for one thing.
You are God.
and i want to spend the rest of my life loving you.
may i always have faith.
always trust.
always hope.
and always love.
04 November 2009
thankful to be growing. and learning.
Father, you are to be praised!
i thank you entirely for the peace and hope that i have found in you, my Hope.
in the past 2 years,
you have strengthened me in so many ways.
and you have changed my heart.
no longer am i afraid of those things.
no longer am i insecure.
for my hope is in You.
my trust is in You.
i am Yours and there is nothing more beautiful than that.
03 November 2009
chapter 2: sentences on hope.
[Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God.]
[Hope empties our hands in order that we may work with them.]
[All sin is rooted in the failure of love. All sin is a withdrawal of love from God, in order to love something else. Sin sets boundaries to our hope, and locks our love in prison.]
[It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.]
[But I do not achieve the contact that knows Him, and thereby knows the Father in Him, until my faith in Him is completed by hope and charity:
hope that grasps His love for me
and charity that pays Him the return of love I owe.]
[Hope seeks not only God in Himself, not only the means to reach Him, but it seeks, finally and beyond all else, God's glory revealed in ourselves. This will be the final manifestation of His infinite mercy, and this is what we pray for when we say "Thy Kingdom come."]
excerpts from No Man is An Island: Thomas Merton.
deliver me, Father.
i have posted this prayer once before, but it is still just as needed today. and its words are still just as powerful.
pry me off dead center.
Deliver me from assuming that mercy is gentle.
Pressure me that I may grow more human,
not through the lessening of my struggles,
but through an expansion of them
that will undamn me
and unbury my gifts.
Deepen my hurt
until I learn to share it
and myself
openly,
and my needs honestly.
Sharpen my fears
until I name them
and release the power I have locked in them
and they in me.
Accentuate my confusion
until I shed those grandiose expectations
that divert me from the small, glad gifts
of the now and the here and the me.
Expose my shame where it shivers,
crouched behind the curtains of propriety,
until I can laugh at last
through my common frailties and failures,
laugh my way toward becoming whole.
Deliver me
from just going through the motions
and wasting everything I have
which is today,
a chance,
a choice,
my creativity,
your call.
Let how much it all matters
pry me off dead center
so if I am moved inside
to tears
or signs
or screams
or smiles
or dreams,
they will be real
and I will be in touch with who I am
and who you are
and who my sisters and brothers are.
-Ted Loder, Guerrillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle