I would be a leaf
in Thy kingdom, LORD,
to drink the glory of You.
In the portmanteau
compartments of life to carry
Your photons of life.
Replenished daily
by the fountains of Your love
sky-full, earth-replete.
Dancing in the wind
whose great power tender breathes
Your eternal joy.
Stormed by sorrow, strife
refuged by Your haven-wings;
exulting, there soar.
Haiku 5-7-5 Sammi's Weekend Writing Prompt #228 – "Portmanteau" – exactly 59 words Cee's Flower of the Day (FOTD) - September 26, 2021
buds careen in bursts
dark limbs reach skyward
the breeze tickles pink
blue spins on green
winter’s undone
For Cee's FOTD, September 14, 2021: RosebudsFlower of the Day Challenge (FOTD). "Please feel free to post every day or when you you feel like it. Don’t forget that my FOTD challenge accepts gardens, leaves and berries as well as flowers."
Common-Place or “Locus Communis” — a place to remember
Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983) and her family helped Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust during World War II and, by all accounts, saved nearly 800 lives in the Netherlands. They were devout Christians.
On February 28, 1944, a Dutch informant told the Nazis of the ten Booms’ activities and the Gestapo raided the home. They kept the house under surveillance, and by the end of the day 35 people, including the entire ten Boom family, were arrested, Although German soldiers thoroughly searched the house, they didn’t find the half-dozen Jews safely concealed in the hiding place. The six stayed in the cramped space for nearly three days before being rescued by the Dutch underground.
All ten Boom family members were incarcerated, including Corrie’s 84-year-old father, who soon died in the Scheveningen prison, located near The Hague. Corrie and her sister Betsie were remanded to the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp, near Berlin. Betsie died there on December 16, 1944. Twelve days later, Corrie was released. None of the other members of her family had survived.
In 1971, she wrote a best-selling book of her experiences during World War II, entitled The Hiding Place in which she recounts her extraordinary experiences through World War II and illustrates how Christ’s strength sustained her.
The above biography taken from biography.com.
“In darkness God’s truth shines most clear.”
Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place
“I have experienced His presence in the deepest hell that man can create. I have really tested the promises of the Bible, and believe me, you can count on them.”
Corrie ten Boom
“Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn’t empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”
Corrie ten Boom
“If you look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. If you look at God, you’ll be at rest.”
Corrie ten Boom
Your Goodness, O LORD
sustains, pursues us with Life
Joy everlasting
For Cee's FOTD and Eugi's Weekly PromptContinue reading “The Goodness of God Sustains”
Genre: Fiction; Word count: 100 Come along and join in with Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers. Rochelle asks that we use the photo prompt (© Sandra Crook) and limit our words to 100 or less.
I counted them too, you know: every turn, every curve, every meter. Every pothole, aggravation, near disaster.
For what it’s worth, the load was never the point.
It was where I was going.
My only regret is you were stuck with me for every millimeter of it, and you hated it.
Life was too slow for you.
It was too fast for me.
I had a load to carry: responsibility to those who depended on me.
You were looking for an escape.
I was looking at the journey’s end.
I wish you could know now it was worth it.
Common-Place or “Locus Communis” — a place to remember
John Owen (1616-1683) was a theologian and Independent minister, and one of the more prolific writers of his time. He had one of the greatest minds of the seventeenth century, and engaged in the scholarly debates then current. He was a defender of high Calvinism, a chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, and an administrator for the University of Oxford. His works were widely read in his lifetime and continue to be published today.
“The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him is not to believe that he loves you.”
John Owen, Communion with God (1657)
The excerpt below is from the same work by Owens, quoted in Randall J. Pederson, The Puritans Daily Readings (pp. 258-259):
“By nature, since the entrance of sin, no man has any communion with God. God is light and we are darkness; and what communion has light with darkness? He is life, we are dead; He is love, and we are enmity; and what agreement can there be between us? Men in such a condition have neither Christ, nor hope, nor God in the world, “being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them” (Eph. 4:18).
Now, two cannot walk together unless they be agreed, (Amos 3:3). While there is this distance between God and man, there is no walking together for them in any fellowship or communion. Our first interest in God was so lost by sin, as that there was left unto us (in ourselves) no possibility of a recovery. As we had deprived ourselves of all power for a returnal, so God had not revealed any way of access unto Himself; or that He could, under any consideration, be approached unto by sinners in peace. Not any work that God had made, not any attribute that He had revealed, could give the least light into such a dispensation.
The manifestation of grace and pardoning mercy, which is the only door of entrance into any such communion, is not committed unto any but unto Him alone in whom it is, by whom that grace and mercy was purchased, through whom it is dispensed, who reveals it from the bosom of the Father. Hence this communion and fellowship with God is not in express terms mentioned in the Old Testament. The thing itself is found there; but the clear light of it, and the boldness of faith in it, is discovered in the gospel, and by the Spirit administered therein. ‘And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.’Ephesians 5:11
Communion is the mutual communication of such good things as wherein the persons holding that communion are delighted, bottomed upon some union between them. So it was with Jonathan and David; their souls clave to one another in love, (1 Sam. 20:17). There was the union of love between them; and then they really communicated all issues of love mutually. In spiritual things this is more eminent: those who enjoy this communion have the most excellent union for the foundation of it; and the issues of that union, which they mutually communicate, are the most precious and eminent…
Our communion, then, with God consists in His communication of Himself unto us, with our returnal unto Him of that which He requires and accepts, flowing from that union which in Jesus Christ we have with Him. This communion is twofold: it is perfect and complete, in the full fruition of His glory and total giving up of ourselves to Him, resting in Him as our utmost end; which we shall enjoy when we see Him as He is; and second, it is initial and incomplete, in the first-fruits and dawnings of that perfection which we have here in grace.
It is, then, I say, of that mutual communication in giving and receiving, after a most holy and spiritual manner, which is between God and the saints while they walk together in a covenant of peace, ratified in the blood of Jesus. We thus pray that the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who has, of the riches of His grace, recovered us from a state of enmity into a condition of communion and fellowship with Himself, that we may have such a taste of His sweetness and excellencies as to be stirred up to a farther longing after the fullness of His salvation, and the eternal fruition of Him in glory.”
“So much as we see of the love of God, so much shall we delight in him, and no more.”
John Owen, Communion with God (1657)
If our hearts delight in God and his face, then we can contemplate losing earthly joys without fear.
Timothy Keller
Count it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.
James 1: 2,3
For Cee's FOTD, September 5, 2021:See the gorgeous red dahlia "American Beauty" on Cee's site. Flower of the Day Challenge (FOTD). "Please feel free to post every day or when you you feel like it. Don’t forget that my FOTD challenge accepts gardens, leaves and berries as well as flowers."
Light seeking
In light enfolded
See joy unbounded
In chastening trials
God entrusting
Each dear petal
Leaf and root
Together joy.
For Cee's FOTD, September 2, 2021:
Now I know that poetry
is a razor blade
slipped into a caramel
dipped apple of
eve’s desire
sharp and tangy . . .
is as love’s wounding
rigor mortis of bites
ennui-soaked
languid post-mortem
of shamanic rites . . .
is a coroner’s tableau of victims
bodies stretched out on gurneys
for the inquest after the serial killer
slips free of the electric chair
because the judge knew his brother cain
at harvard law . . .
is hummingbirds and bats
dandelions, a lover’s hand
broken stalks, memories . . .
is my heart laid out across the sky
a constellation charted out of unknown
algorithms multiplied
to infinity
dove’s wings
rapidly beating
now.
Today Victoria is guest-hosting at dVerse: Meeting the Bar and asks us to write a "Solilo-Quoi?", paying extra attention to form or other poetic devices in our self-talk. Click Mr. Linky for more and join in.
You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.
Trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD GOD is an everlasting rock.
Isaiah 26:3-4
For Cee's FOTD, August 22, 2021:
