I've just returned from an evening jog, and imprinted forever on my memory is the sight of several dozen Canadian geese sillhouettes darkening the border of moonlit Elmwood lake like so many silent sentries, motionless, absurdly majestic.

Fourteen days remaining, and Hannah and I have mapped out an event for each of them, to be photographed and compiled into a pre-wedding album.

I anticipate mountain vistas and renewed purpose, although the prospect of leaving these vast skies and indolent hours sometimes pulls a stitch out of the seam around my heart.

Daughter of Laughter

I've just completed Frederich Buechner's latest novel, The Son of Laughter, which retells the story of Jacob. I percieve anew the reality of the Old Testament as a state of pregnancy: the sickness of doubt, kickings of promise, fear, joy, longing. I see Christ as the fulfillment of those groaning years. I inherit the legacy, I belong to that seed; I, too, yearn and groan for a future, sustained by Faith in the promises and the heritage of those who have preceeded me. The Blessing runs off with me. "It is beautiful and it is appalling. It races through the barren hills to an end of its own." I am the daughter of the Son of Laughter, and my name has its own humble niche in the glorious geneology of the Promise.

How wonderful are the ways of God.

on my mind

"Christianity has the ring, the feel, of unique truth. Of essential truth. By it, life is made full instead of meaningless. Cosmos becomes beuaitful at the Centre, instead of chillingly ugly beneath the lovely pathos of spring. But the emptiness, the meaninglessness, and the ugliness can only be seen, I think, when one has glimpsed the fullness, the meaning, and the beauty. It is when heaven and hell have both been glimpsed that going back is impossible."

"Our only hope: to leap into the Word
That opens up the shuttered universe."

"It is not possible to be 'incidentally a Christian.' The fact of Christinaity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non-Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming firsts but many balances."

"If God is to be, in truth, sought first, He must be seen as heart's desire."

"Secretly we are all perhaps the Questing Knight. And yet, whatever the object of our quest, we learn when we find it that it does not ever contain the joy that broke our heart with longing. Thus, Lewis says, 'if a man diligently followed this desire [for joy], pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given--nay, cannot even be imagined as given--in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.' "

"We have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. ...We were created for eternity."

"[Christ] must often seem to us to be playing fast and loose with us. The adult must seem to mislead the child, and the Master the dog. They misread the signs. Their ignorance and their wishes twist everything."

"Love is the final reality, and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom."

"Love not only begets love, it transmits strength."

"Every disability conceals a vocation, if onyl we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.'"

--Sheldon VanAuken: A Severe Mercy