The Secret Life of Bees

Great Losers

I have a confession. I am a scavenger.

I just can't seem to walk past a smidgen of interesting brokenness or discarded story. I am so moved by outsider and found art because deep in my heart I long to be a mosaic artist. I have not yet begun to piece together those precious bits and fragments pocketed along my journey.

As Keith and I were walking to church Sunday he bent to pick up a bright piece of turquoise "glass" at the curb. I exclaimed "Don't! It's not glass, it's a discarded cough drop! I only know because I picked it up yesterday and it was sticky..."

Redemption resides deeply in both of us.

We spend hours at the shore with our noses down hoping to find precious bits of pottery or beach glass worn smooth by sand and waves. All the diamonds in the world don't mean as much to me as a tiny little shard of blue and white pottery or a heart shaped rock found by a loved one.

That is why this quote touched me so deeply. I long to be the kind of friend who gathers great treasure and wisdom by carefully listening and fixing those pieces in my heart.

Fragments scavenged from Bob at The Corner:

Every hour’s talk we have with a friend leaves fragments that we ought to gather up and keep to feed our heart’s hunger or the hunger of others’ hearts, as we go on. When we hear good words spoken or read a good book, we should gather up the fragments of knowledge, the suggestions of helpful thoughts, the broken pieces, and fix them in our hearts for use in our lives. We allow large values of the good things we hear or read to turn to waste continually because we are poor listeners or do not try to keep what we hear. We let the broken pieces be lost and thereby are great losers. If only we would gather up and keep all the good things that come to us through conversations and through reading, we would soon have great treasures of knowledge and wisdom.

J.R. Russell, The Book of Comfort

Families

Join Matthew 25 here

Long, happy dawdling

I LOVE this:

The imagination needs moodling--long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: "I see where I can make an annual cut of $3.47 in my meat budget." But they have no slow, big ideas. And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and down stairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.

If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland

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Tragedy in Afganistan

Four aid workers were killed today in an ambush in Afghanistan, they were IRC staff members, 2 were Canadians.

Please pray for peace and for their families, and the foundations they serve.

International Rescue Committee Releases Names of Victims of Ambush in Afghanistan

Tell better stories

“Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather you must tell it a new powerful tale, one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into the future so that we can take the next step forward.”

Ivan Illich (Quoted in Just:Imagine by Danielle Strickland and her co-author Campbell Roberts)

thanks mike

Peace for all

Woe to us indeed if we forget the homeless ones who have no vote, no power, nobody to lobby for them, and who might as well have no faces even, the way we try to avoid the troubling sight of them in the streets of the cities where they roam like stray cats. And as we listen each night to the news of what happened in our lives that day, woe to us if we forget our own homelessness.

To be homeless the way people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not to be really at home in any of them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and our lives are so intricately interwoven that there can be no real peace for any of us until there is peace for all of us.

Source: Frederick Buechner - The Longing for Home

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