What The Bird Said Early In The Year

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear

‘This year the summer will come true. This year. This
year.

‘Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees

This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.

‘This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,

Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

‘This time they will not lead you round and back

To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

‘This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,

We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

‘Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,

Quick, quick, quick, quick!—the gates are drawn apart.

C.S. Lewis, Poems, (Harcourt: San Diego, 1992), 71.

Why C.S. Lewis Is The Best

"If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no
difference what you have chosen instead." (Thomas More) Those are hard words to
take. Will it really make no difference whether it was women or patriotism,
cocaine or art, whisky or a seat in the Cabinet, money or science? Well, surely
no difference that matters. We shall have missed the end for which we are
formed, and rejected the only thing that satisfies. Does it matter to a
man dying in a desert by which choice of route he missed the only well?

--C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Forgiveness is Something Else!

"...Remember that God knows all the real excuses very much better than we do. If there are real ‘extenuating circumstances’ there is no fear that He will overlook them. Often He must know many exuses that we have never thought of, and therefore humble souls will, after death, have the delightful surprise of discovering that on certain occasions they sinned much less than they had thought. All the real excusing He will do. What we have got to take to Him is the inexcusable bit, the sin. We are only wasting time by talking about all the parts which can (we think) be excused. When you go to a doctor you show him the bit of you that is wrong–say, a broken arm. It would be a mere waste of time to keep on explaining that your legs and eyes and throat are all right. You may be mistaken in thinking so, and anyway, if they are really all right, the doctor will know that.”

"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."

--C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

"The silence of God is different from that of [humans]. When Jesus lay silent and asleep in the ship, He was more kind and His arm was more near to help and more certain than the anxious cry of the doubting disciples suggests. The silence of God and of Jesus is not of indifference. It is the silence of higher thoughts. God is fitting stone to stone in His plan for the world and our lives, even though we can see only a confused and menaingless jumble of stones heaped together under a silent heaven."

--Helmut Thielicke (quoted in When the Soul Listens).

White Is A Colour

“White is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Marcy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.” –G.K. Chesterton

Weak

Falsehood is always weak, no matter how strong it looks.
–Phillips Brooks

Forgive Yourself

“The real difficulty usually stems from the fact that the counselee feels guilty because he knows that, although the unfortunate act has been forgiven, he is still the kind of person who did it.”
–Jay E. Adams, The Christian Counselor’s Manual (p. 64)

Teenagers

“The opaque glance and the pimples. The fancy new nakedness they’re all dressed up in with no place to go. The eyes full of secrets they have a strong hunch everyone is onto. The shadowed brow. Being not quite a child and not quite a grown-up either is hard work, and they look it. Living in two worlds at once is no picnic.”
–Frederick Buechner