“I want to feel passion, I want to feel pain.
I want to weep at the sound of your name.
Come make me laugh,
come make me cry...
just make me feel alive.”
Joey Lauren Adams

Not of this world...

Alone...

The hero's challenge:

(Jesus: )
From now until then, heaven, faith is the only connection that you have to this side. It's nothing you can see, nothing you can feel, and nothing you can prove. It only exists in the hearts of those who love Me. And when you have faith, you somehow know, even if you don't know at all. There's something beyond the physical, something inside you that makes that link and connection, even though the path is so unapparent to the carnal mind.

The hero's challenge is to believe Me despite outward appearances and all circumstances that would point to the contrary. The hero's challenge is to believe Me above anything that your eyes can see or that your senses tell you.

Faith

The disappointments that test your faith benefit you more in the long run than the things that turn out the way you want them to. The disappointments make you search your heart, they make you examine your faith, and when you do, you'll come down to the core of it all: that very little of the spiritual realm is provable in the physical, and that the decision to believe or not is simply based on your choice‚ not on the facts. That's the way I made it. That's why it's called faith, because you can't see it, you can't prove it. "More blessed are they who, having not seen, yet have believed" (Jn.20:29).

You can choose to have faith or you can choose disbelief. If you choose faith, you become more powerful in spirit, you are less daunted by the "winds and the waves," the circumstances and conditions that would pull you away from faith, and you grow stronger, not weaker. When you are strengthened in faith, you command more of My power. It's a cycle of victory and growth and greater answers to prayer, greater happiness, greater trust in Me.

The first spring butterfly....

Beauty doesn't always see the ugliness it's sitting on.

“For every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it. For every truth there is an ear somewhere to hear it. For every love there is a heart somewhere to receive it.”

Beauty seen is never lost, God’s colors all are fast.

The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found, it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.
(Gustave Courbet)

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Everyone is like a butterfly, they start out ugly and awkward and then morph into beautiful graceful butterflies that everyone loves.”
Drew Barrymore

Wild Man

My Niece

This Earth and your short life here is a testing ground, there are no two ways about it. There's no way to come to Earth, learn what you need to learn, grow in the ways your spirit needs to grow, experience what you need to experience, and accomplish what you need to accomplish without this sore‚ painful testing. That's the Earth life. That's life experience on Earth, and that's why what you learn during your life on Earth is so valuable—irreplaceable, really—because it's so hard earned.

"To hunger and thirst after righteousness is when nothing in the world can fascinate us so much as being near to God."

Smith Wigglesworth

Waiting

I'm here
Waiting for you
Too come and rescue me
From this awful blue

Niece!

I am an Auntie 3 times...my niece was born yesterday evening!
Finally a girl...may she bring some calmness to my wild nephews!
This picture gives you a idea of what I am talking about.

Passion

Three passions have governed my life:

The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.

Bertrand Russell

Sunday Sentiments....

When I go to confession I don't offer God small sins, petty squabbles, jealousies... I offer him sins worth forgiving!

Before we can repent, we have to sin.

Although you may think me mad because of it, I just think differently and some of the trivial elements of life that absorb so many do not affect me.
- Grigori Rasputin

Waiting on tomorrow....

“Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow.”
Mary Anne Radmacher

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow is our destined way, but to act that each tomorrow may find us further than today.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, you shall begin it well and serenely...”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

It never ends!

Lonely days........

Saturday Laughs

Watch "Dan in Really Life" if you haven't...

"What good is a heart that's kept so safe?"

My good friend Claire told me this line. I think it's so true.

Blame Thor?!

British author G.K. Chesterton argued that even blasphemy is a kind of tribute to God, because it is based on belief.
"If anyone doubts this," he wrote, "let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor."
—Michael Gerson, The Washington Post

Beyond infinity

By David Yount, Scripps Howard News Service

Seeking to assign blame for the devastation wrought by the Asian tsunami, a television journalist asked a Jesuit priest if God could be held accountable. The priest replied that we cannot hold God accountable for anything unless we first believe in Him.

The late Albert Einstein was the most celebrated physicist of the past century. Although he was not traditionally devout, his life was devoted to a search for God through science.

"God does not play dice with the universe," he affirmed. "Randomness was no explanation for why things happen. Rather, there are laws behind everything, which simply haven't as yet been discovered."

Either there is no such thing as a miracle, he said, or everything is a miracle.

Rejecting atheism, Einstein explained: "We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is."

Once, while Einstein was lecturing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a student challenged him by demanding "What is beyond infinity?" Without hesitation the scientist replied: "The face of God."

Sven and Olaf

Sven and Olaf worked together in a Minnesota factory....and both were laid off. So...dey went to the Unemployment Office together.

Asked his occupation, Olaf said, "Panty stitcher. I sew da elastic onto da ladies cotton panties."

The clerk looked up panty stitcher. Finding it classified as unskilled labor, she gave Olaf $300 a week in unemployment compensation.



Sven, when asked his occupation replied, "Diesel fitter."

The clerk looked up diesel fitter..and it was classified as a skilled job. So, the clerk gave Sven $600 a week in unemployment compensation.

When Olaf found this out, he was furious ! He stormed back into the office to find out why his friend and co-worker was collecting double his benefits.

The clerk explained, "Panty stitcher's are unskilled labor and diesel fitters are skilled labor."

"Vat skill?" yelled Olaf. "I sew da elastic on da panties. Olaf puts dem over his head and says, "Yah...... DIESEL FITTER."

I have searched the world and found not.
I have traveled far and wide yet seen not.
I have wanted, desired, longed for and received not.
Yet I have rested in His arms and found it was all I need!

M.C.

John 8: 1-11

Today I was sitting talking with Jesus & just thinking. Then that verse; Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; popped into my head & afterwards a few lines:

She was sinning wholeheartedly before than,
but she gave them all up at the touch of His hand.
What would I not give up too at the touch of His hand?

I thought what love He had that no person was to small to be showered with His care. It really is a beautiful story. I would love to know what she went on to do with her life.
It's a wonderful feeling knowing no matter what I am loved by Him...and forgiven!