Your shield

"He will cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you will find refuge;

His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart."

~Psalm 91:4

The pure in heart

"It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to."

~C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering

which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve,

and you find that you have excluded life itself."

~C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

één zwanenpaar maar
vier ganzen
en een futenpaar
koeien aan de overkant
er is er één die loeit
van mij mag het allemaal vandaag
ontelbare boterbloemen
de meidoorn, ze bloeit
smalle paadjes dwars door 't fluitenkruid
o, wat zie ik dit graag

waar blijft de tijd?
ach, wat maakt het uit,
het is later
zonnestralen, ze twinkelen
over het water
de Rijn kibbelt zacht
de lente, zij bloeit
en ik zucht
Heer, hoe lang nog?
de zomer groeit

mei 2016, Palmerswaard, Rhenen

Why You utter no answer

"I know now, Lord, why You utter no answer.

You are Yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away."

~C.S. Lewis

Something

"The problem is that contemporary people think life is all about finding happiness.

We decide what conditions will make us happy and then we work to bring those conditions about.

To live for happiness means that you are trying to get something out of life.

But when suffering comes along, it takes the conditions for happiness away,

and so suffering destroys all your reason to keep living.

But to “live for meaning” means not that you try to get something out of life

but rather that life expects something from us.

In other words, you have meaning only when there is something in life more important

than your own personal freedom and happiness, 

something for which you are glad to sacrifice your happiness."

~Timothy Keller

Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

My deepest awareness

"My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ
and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it."
~Brennan Manning

I forget the rest

"The art of art, the glory of expression

and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity."

~Walt Whitman

"We were together. I forget the rest."

~Walt Whitman

Of what’s going on within

"..Because of that, you’re not without melancholy,

and you feel emptiness where there could be friendship and high and serious affections,

and you feel a terrible discouragement gnawing at your psychic energy itself,

and fate seems able to put a barrier against the instincts for affection,

or a tide of revulsion that overcomes you.

And then you say, How long, O Lord!

Well, then, what can I say; 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 and then go on their way.

So now what are we to do, keep this fire alive inside, have salt in ourselves, wait patiently,
but with how much impatience, await the hour,
I say, when whoever wants to, will come and sit down there, will stay there, for all I know?
May whoever believes in God await the hour, which will come sooner or later.

In the springtime a bird in a cage knows very well that there’s something he’d be good for;

he feels very clearly that there’s something to be done but he can’t do it;

what it is he can’t clearly remember, and he has vague ideas and says to himself,

‘the others are building their nests and making their little ones and raising the brood’,

and he bangs his head against the bars of his cage.

And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suffering.

‘Look, there’s an idler’, says another passing bird — that fellow’s a sort of man of leisure.

And yet the prisoner lives and doesn’t die; nothing of what’s going on within shows outside,

he’s in good health, he’s rather cheerful in the sunshine.

But then comes the season of migration. A bout of melancholy —

but, say the children who look after him,

he’s got everything that he needs in his cage, after all —

but he looks at the sky outside, heavy with storm clouds,

and within himself feels a rebellion against fate.

I’m in a cage, I’m in a cage, and so I lack for nothing, you fools!

Me, I have everything I need!

Ah, for pity’s sake, freedom, to be a bird like other birds!"

~Vincent van Gogh,
excerpts from letter 133, to Theo van Gogh, Cuesmes, juni 1880

Different kind of tear now

"There's a different kind of tear now 
In my eye 
A response to a freer wind 
That's blowing in a bigger sky."

~Rich Mullins 

The art of being

"Peace is first of all the art of being."

~Henri Nouwen

Cannot bear

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

~T.S. Eliot

Not an adventurer by choice

"I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate."

~Vincent van Gogh