a settled place

Don't it feel like the wind is always howl'n? Don't it seem like there's never any light! Once a day, don't you wanna throw the towel in? It's easier than puttin' up a fight. -"It's a Hard-Knock Life", from  Annie One of my fun garage sale finds last weekend was a kids' CD of Broadway musical songs... so fun to listen to and so different than stuff we already have! "It's a Hard Knock Life" from Annie is one of the songs on there and I was singing part of it tonight after supper. When I got to the part about throwing the towel in, Ivory piped up with "no, it's some days don't you want to go to a palace!" I replayed it in my head and realized how easy it would have been for her to come up with that instead of the actual words, and then thought about how much lovelier her thought process was! I  was ready to throw the towel in by 6 p.m. - but she was palace-minded! Well. I could learn a few things f...

Death of a believer is never in vain Death does not swallow - it's all for His gain. And yet the heart cries, and the pleas arise - "why, WHY, does  she have to die?" The faces behind who still must walk on we know little children are not very strong. The tears pour down and our prayers arise - "Be with them, Lord, that their faith would not die." Her words, her life showed sacrifice here A woman of faith, to whom God was near. It comes to an end and our praises arise. "Father, in her life, you have been glorified". Let's kneel to our still-great God in prayer, even when we wonder if He's really there. "For whom the Lord  loveth ", He tests and He tries, And in deepest grief, we lift up our eyes. Janella's death has hit me hard... which is a little bit uncharacteristic of me. Not that it isn't so tragic and awful, but that I didn't know her well, and I had only had some brief Facebook and blog commun...

I remember when we were assigned "jobs" for books in AP English, one of the roles was to keep track of quotes throughout the book. A combination of quotes can be a really effective way to present a book in its entirety, and to see themes recurring throughout the pages. For my review of "Walking on Water", I decided to do it that way. The book is a little scattered anyway in the writing style - it's an artsy book, about the intersection of art and faith, and it's excellent, but takes some time to digest and some patience to look for the overarching messages and themes. I loved author Madeleine L'Engle's perspective as a whole - that art created without order, or acknowledgement, or glory to the ultimate Artist is just chaos. "All art is cosmos, cosmos found within chaos. At least all Christian art (by which I mean all true art, and I'll go deeper into this later) is cosmos in chaos. There's some modern art, in all disciplines, which is ...