Meditate on it

It sounds awful.   No reasonable person would wish suffering on himself or on others, but Paul always was an odd man, even before his trip to Damascus. Certainly, his revelation and relationship with Christ set him apart as a freak, an extremest in his community and travels. The thing about Paul is---he rings true. He can be circutuitous. He can be cryptic.  But when Paul sets out to solidify a point, his writing cuts through the haze, it compels... Reading 2 Corinthians this morning, I heard him loud and clear: But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, And be found in him , not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: That I may know him, and t

On Flannery O'Connor and her battle with lupus: "Her faith and habits of mind allowed O’Connor to concentrate on the essentials, and she mined her personal struggles to great effect in her stories and novels. In a sense, her vulnerable body, utterly dependent on the care of others, served as a prism through which she viewed a complacent world that did not have the daily reminder of life’s awful fragility."    “O'Connor's works as she described them are about the action of grace in the lives of characters who aren't always open to God's grace,” Kurt told me. “God is constantly trying to engage each person in ways that are not always clean and tidy. God's grace often appears in the messiness of life and in the suffering that we endure.”  -Joan Desmond,  National Catho lic Register “The mind serves best when it’s anchored in the Word of God,” she wrote in a letter. “There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.”