Does what goes on inside show on the outside? Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.
Vincent van Gogh
A Mini Playlist
A few songs I’ve been listening to on repeat lately:
- “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” – Creedence Clearwater Revival
I love CCR, and I especially love how happy and carefree the guys look in this music video. Just look at John Fogerty sitting there playing his guitar! - “Midnight Rider” – The Allman Brothers Band
Just a really good song. Puts me in a rebellious mood. “I’m not gonna let ’em catch me, no.” (See me, making a fool of myself, below.) - “The Long and Winding Road” – The Beatles
I’m not sure why I didn’t pay much attention to this Beatles song in the past. It’s very pretty, and it makes me feel sad and wistful. It’s the kind of song I can imagine reinterpreting as a ballad addressed to God.
Welcome to the Club
We are writers – which is to say, we make sense of our lives after the fact, once we’ve had a chance to unscramble the details in our notebooks. If you want to be a writer, you should know that you will be up against some very hard truths, and you must leave your ego at the door.
If that sounds all right by you – well, then, welcome to the club.*
*Not that membership to our club is particularly elite. We’re mostly prone to attracting the odd souls who can’t sleep until they’ve wrestled with the chaos of their thoughts and spun out their heart’s deepest turbulence in lines of poetry and scraps of prose.
Hope is not a granted wish or a favor performed; no, it is far greater than that. It is a zany, unpredictable dependence on a God Who loves to surprise us out of our socks.
Max Lucado
Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.
Jamie Anderson
Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up;
does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil;
does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth;
bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails.
1 Corinthians 13:4-8
Happy Valentine’s Day.