embrace

Behold what you are

Become what you receive

Take up the bread and wine

Embrace the mystery

Music and Lyric by Gord Johnson

Sung by Steve Bell, Devotion

warms

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and silly people.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

character

Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

Abraham Lincoln

spirit

But you’ve always made disciples

Out of prodigals and worse

Just by giving us your Spirit

You make us into your church.

Carolyn Arends

sown

The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies.

Gertrude Jekyll

given

Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

nearer

The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth,

One is nearer God's Heart in a garden

Than anywhere else on Earth.

Dorothy Frances Gurney

count

People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately.

Oscar Wilde

longing

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

sign

It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.

C.S. Lewis

hatched

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

C. S. Lewis

nourishing

I am struck by how sharing our weakness and difficulties is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes.

Jean Vanier, Community and Growth

content

When people love each other, they are content with very little. When we have light and joy in our hearts, we don't need material wealth. The most loving communities are often the poorest. If our own life is luxurious and wasteful, we can't approach poor people. If we love people, we want to identify with them and share with them.

Jean Vanier

unknown

Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.

David Whyte

grow

If you grow a healthy tree, you'll pick healthy fruit. If you grow a diseased tree, you'll pick worm-eaten fruit. The fruit tells you about the tree.

Matthew 12:33, The Message

pretending

Oh how I need a vacation

‘Cause it’s so exhausting pretending I’m God

There would be much less frustration

If I would let you do your job

Carolyn Arends

discover

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain

rediscovering

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

Rachel Carlson

vast

Here is love vast as the ocean

Loving kindness as the flood

When the Prince of life, our ransom

Shed for us His precious blood

Who His love will not remember?

Who can cease to sing His praise?

He can never be forgotten

Throughout Heaven’s eternal days

Lyrics by William Rees, translated from Welsh to English by William Williams 1900

vulnerable

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

C. S. Lewis

truth

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

Leo Tolstoy

all

Give me all of you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! I have not come to torment or frustrate the natural man or woman, but to KILL IT! No half measures will do. I don’t want to only prune a branch here and a branch there; rather I want the whole tree out! Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires, all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them ALL over to me, give yourself to me and I will make of you a new self---in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

begin

Growth begins when we begin to accept our own weakness.

Jean Vanier

home

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a "wandering to find home," why should we not look forward to the arrival?

C. S. Lewis

garden-maker

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.

Vita Sackville-West

attentive

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson