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I could never survive in the Pacific Northwest. We had nothing but gray skies and fog all week, and it was driving me insane. And then this morning, be it only for a few hours, the sky cleared and the sun rose and I stood in my living room with the blinds wide […] Surrender. We don’t like that word. I don’t like that word. I really don’t like it applied to me. I’m a very independent person. I do things on my own. I like to be self-sufficient. And the word “surrender” says to me things that I don’t want. […] It is human nature to try to turn every situation to our own advantage, and to find the easiest way through it. This is not a bad thing. It’s why we have engineers and explorers and artists. They are the ones who see the world a little differently from everyone else, who try […] Yesterday, a friend of mine (she knows who she is) told me that she and her husband are officially “old” because they got a humidifier for Christmas. (And were happy about it.) And I said, “Oh, come on. You know how excited I was about my flannel sheets, right?” It’s like we’ve got […] We have expectations about things. It’s kinda part of being human. Not that animals don’t have expectations. They learn, as well as they can, and understand cause and effect. But our grasp of expectations is rather more complex than what goes through my parents’ cat’s head when Mom claps her hands […] “Is a slave a slave if he doesn’t know he’s been enslaved?” The worst trap is the one you don’t realize you’re in. It’s a strange truth of my psyche that I realize I’ve fallen in a rut because everything starts getting on my nerves. It’s like a detector […] Emmanuel: God with us. It’s a name that’s gotten into our language, and a concept that has gotten into our heads. It’s in our culture and history. Things and people are named Immanuel/Emmanuel all the time. And by some quirk of the human psyche, we have got used to […] I like baking. I like the food that I bake, and I like the way my house smells when I’ve baked. But given that there are only two of us living here, we have a dilemma: what do I do with my baked goods? Give them away, of course. […] Those who know me know that my favorite book in the world is The Lord of the Rings. The odd thing, though, is that every time I read it, I notice something different. Yesterday I was reading the chapter “Mount Doom”, and half a paragraph struck me like never before. Those who’ve seen […] Prophecy is an interesting thing. It likes to show up in a lot of scripture and a lot of fiction. It catches our fancy. The idea that the future can be known tugs at our imagination, as we are caught in a life where only the past can be seen and understood – […] |
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