first

What I must do first of all is be faithful. If I believe that the first commandment is to love God with my whole heart, mind, and soul, then I should at least be able to spend one hour a day with nobody else but God. The question as to whether it is helpful, useful, practical, or fruitful is completely irrelevant, since the only reason to love is love itself. Everything else is secondary.

Henri Nouwen

existence

The Word became flesh to communicate to us human beings caught in the mud, the pain, the fears and the brokenness of existence, the life, the joy, the communion, the ecstatic gift of love that is the source of all love and life and unity in our universe and that is the very life of God.

Jean Vanier

look

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment.

Georgia O'Keefe

difference

The difference between you and God is that God doesn't think He's you.

Anne Lamott

small

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is to small to be made into a burden.

Corrie ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

green

Fresh and green we will remain

Bearing fruit to a ripe old age

Happy to tell about Your name

A blessed endeavour

The righteous flourish like the palm

And grow like the cedars of Lebanon

Planted in the courts of God

Forever and ever

Fresh and Green, Music and Lyric by Steve Bell, adapted from Psalm 92

understand

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.

Neil Armstrong

mending

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

Anne Lamott

precious

We must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.

Frederick Buechner

simply

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

Robert Frost

recklessly

Everything is blooming most recklessly. If it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

Rainer Maria Rilke

gladness

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Frederick Buechner

instrument

Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener seems to be only one of the intruments, not the composer.

Geoffrey B. Charlesworth

fathomless

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Frederick Buechner

moo

Who was the first guy that looked at a cow and said, "I think that I'll drink whatever comes out of those things when I squeeze them?"

Calvin & Hobbes

dwell

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.

Rachel Carson

without

God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

C.S. Lewis

reflection

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Thomas Merton

whispers

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

C.S. Lewis

expressive

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

Henry David Thoreau

dream

It is almost impossible to watch a sunset and not dream.

Bern Williams

hourglass

Seize the day, seize whatever you can

'Cause life slips away just like hourglass sand

Seize the day, pray for grace from God's hand

Then nothing will stand in your way

Seize the day

Carolyn Arends, Seize the Day

intoxicate

Flowers really do intoxicate me.

Vita Sackville-West

wild

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here, My heart's in the Highlands a chasing the deer; Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe; My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go.

Robert Burns

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