"A child is one who accepts even the most extravagant gifts, even the gift of love, not on the basis of believing that he deserves it and not in spite of the fact that he knows he does not, but simply because it is given.. . ..and surely this is a hard saying. After we have given so much of our lives to the task of trying to understand, after we have been so continually anxious lest our faith wither and bear no fruit, then it is a real shock to be told that it is only by not trying that we become, that it is only by not resisting evil that we defeat it, that it is only by losing our lives that we save them. Yet if on the one hand we are shocked by this, on the other to know ourselves at all is to know the truth of it.. . .It is just when we realize that it is impossible by any effort of our own to make ourselves children and thus to enter the kingdom of Heaven that we become children. We are children, perhaps, at the very moment we know that it is as children that God loves us--not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our Lord."

-----Frederick Buechner, "Become Like Children," from "The Magnificent Defeat"

On To Bethlehem

so i'm at this wheel it's three am
waiting for the caffeine to come around
and life rears it's ugly head again
they say your radio's cool and retail's way down

and i'd like to say i'm faithful
to the task at hand
speaking gospel to a handful
and others with their list of demands

it's cold this year and i'm late on my dues
it's cold in here ah but that's nothing new
my heart's electric with your love again
so it's on to bethlehem

you might surmise that i ran there
but i really only crept
lead me to the place where love runs wild
and then it dogs your every step

you know how fickle my heart is
prone to wonder my Lord
yeah we talk but it's at arms length
always got one eye on the door

God wraps Himself up in human skin
for those who want to touch
and God let them drive the nails in
for those of us who know way too much

You come bearing all our burdens
and take Your lovers for a ride
but we stay holed up in our cages
fashioned by our own design

so tell me what is your secret
what's on your blister soul
what is that one little secret
you know the one that has taken its toll

'cause daddy's banging on your gate again
yeah he won't leave you alone
got a whole lot of dry warm rooms
and the finest of homes

it's cold this year and i'm late on my dues
it's cold in here ah but that's nothing new
my heart's electric with your love again
so it's on to bethlehem

-----Bill Mallonee

I'm not normally a big fan of Henri, and I would change his phrase, "trust that good things will happen" to "trust that God's perfect plan will be carried out in my life, and that His will, though inscrutable, is ultimately good". But on the whole, I like what he's saying here.

"Just imagine what Mary was actually saying in the words, 'I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me' (Luke 1:38). She was saying, 'I don't know what this all means, but I trust that good things will happen.' She trusted so deeply that her waiting was open to all possibilities. And she did not want to control them. She believed that when she listened carefully, she could trust what was going to happen. To wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude toward life. So is to trust that something will happen to us that is far beyond our own imaginings. So, too, is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life, trusting that God molds us according to God's love and not according to our fear. The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy, or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control."

-----Henri Nouwen, "A Spirituality of Waiting: Being Alert to God's Presence in Our Lives," Weavings, January 1987

"I am old and full of tears, and I see that you also begin to feel the sorrow that is born with us. Abandon hope: do not abandon desire. Feel no wonder that these glimpses of your Island so easily confuse themselves with viler things, and are so easily blasphemed. Above all, never try to keep them, never try to revisit the same place or time wherein the vision was accorded to you. You will pay the penalty of all who would bind down to one place or time within our country that which our country cannot contain. Have you not heard from the Stewards of the sin of idolatry, and how in their old chronicles, the manna turned to worms if any tried to hoard it? Be not greedy, be not passionate; you will but crush dead on your own breast with hot, rough hands the thing you loved. But if ever you incline to doubt that the thing you long for is something real, remember what your own experience has taught you. Think that it is a feeling, and at once the feeling has no value. Stand sentinel at your own mind, watching for that feeling, and you will find--what shall I say--a flutter in the heart, an image in the head, a sob in the throat: and was that your desire? You know that it was not, and that no feeling whatever will appease you, that feeling, refine it as you will, is but one more spurious claimant--spurious as the gross lusts of which the giant speaks. Let us conclude then that what you desire is no state of yourself at all, but something, for that very reason, Other and Outer. And knowing this you will find tolerable the truth that you cannot attain it. That the thing should be, is so great a good that when you remember "it is" you will forget to be sorry that you can never have it. Nay, anything that you could have would be so much less than this that its fruition would be immeasurably below the mere hunger for this. Wanting is better than having. The glory of any world wherein you can live is in the end appearance: but then, as one of my sons has said, that leaves the world more glorious yet."

-----C.S. Lewis, Father Wisdom's discourse from "Pilgrim's Regress"