The Chronicles of Janie

"Your problem is not the first fifteen minutes of the day. It's the next twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes. You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing total contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God."  - Dallas Willard, as quoted in the book Soul Keeping, by John Ortberg My image I have recently begun to rethink my quiet times; Precious morning hours, when the house is still and the sun not yet risen and the coffee sends out delicious steam... When I wander the chilly, twilit rooms with quiet song and prayer flowing freely in the silence... When I scribble down careful poem-prayers in an effort to understand my own wayward thoughts... When the Bible lies open - English on one side, Portuguese on the other - and I marvel at the ancient words that are just as new and fresh as if they'd been penned yesterday... I no longer consider these hours as the one , the only , the quiet time (!), snatched from the j...

Have I actually been here for seven months? It seems like forever, or no time at all. What it doesn't feel like is what it is: over half a year (just that little, just that much) spent in a new place. But is it really a new place? How can it be, when so many things feel so familiar? There's a part of me that fails to recognize how exotic my life - when viewed through the eyes of most of my readers - might seem. It's only when I contemplate returning home (home? Where is that, exactly?) that I realize this life has not always been, nor will it always be, as it is now. Maybe I won't always go grocery shopping in labyrinthine markets, where some of the vendors know us by sight and throw in extra produce for free. Maybe there will come a day when crossing the road won't be an adventure of epic proportions. When almost getting hit by a car is actually a big deal again. Where a healthy prayer life can be viewed as an extra, instead of an essen...

source My current thoughts about luxury began to come to me when one of the Dondo missionaries offered me Coca-Cola. "Do you want some Coke?" He asked, And I said,"yes", even though I don't like the taste of Coke. But it is a somewhat hard-to-get variety of soda, and it was served over ice, in a glass that I wouldn't have to wash afterward. It was a symbol of luxury, and I took it and savored it as such. Luxury is such a funny thing. When you have it, you don't care about it. But when you tip your world sidewise and get spilled out into the unfamiliar, you relish each item of luxury - and its' accompanying illusion of control - to the very fullest. You know the luxury won't last...in fact, you wouldn't even want it to, because then you'd be used to it and it wouldn't be special any more. You know that the control isn't real...and you're glad of that, too, because you've long ago realized that life doesn'...

Links to parts 1 & 2 HERE   Psalm 24: 4-6 Exodus 29: 4-9 & 19-21 Matthew Henry Commentary on Psalm 24: 3-6 (Section 2) [Christ] loves us, and by his sacrificial death he has freed us from our sins and made us a kingdom of priests to serve his God and Father. Revelation 1: 5-6 The hands lifted up in prayer must be pure hands, no blot of unjust gain cleaving to them, nor any thing else that defiles the man and is offensive to the holy God. 1   It is often easy to lose sight of the true calling of Christianity. The calling to be the unique people: the lights in the dark, the cities on the hilltops, the living sacrifices. Perfect, as Christ is perfect. The blood-covered priests pointing the way to the Savior Messiah. A calling that is more easily typed than lived. I have only to hold my daily actions up against the mirror of the Psalm for my sinfulness to come out in ugly relief. Pure in act and thought? Never allowing distractions to come between me ...