This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which...
What an amazing thing is the coming of spring to London. The very pavements seem ready to crack and lift under the denied earth; in the air is a consciousness of life which tells you that if traffic stopped for a fortnight grass would grow again in P...
She had always suffered from a curious fear of what was going to happen round the next corner. Even when life went smoothly and nothing occurred to justify her vague apprehensions, they did not altogether disperse. She had tried to face these fears a...
This one time in Year Eight we had to write on butcher’s paper how we’d like people to see us. Remember ours? We were like, ‘We don’t want people to see us as leaders or heroes or anything out of the ordinary. We just want them to see us as o...
Many parents lack a biblical view of discipline. They tend to think of discipline as revenge - getting even with the children for what they did. Hebrews 12 makes it clear that discipline is not punitive, but corrective. Hebrews 12 calls discipline a ...
As we embrace the mystery of love, we see that it contains not an absence of error, but the presence of grace. It contains not the absence of anger or pain, but the presence of forgiveness and healing. Not the absence of disharmony or confusion, but ...
Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the par...
With some people there is easy conversation and not enough time in one meal to get out everything you want to tell her--all the things you didn't know you'd been holding in until you're suddenly confessing to Facebook-stalking ex-boyfriends and how n...
As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to p...
Some people spend their entire lives devoted to a religion that claims to be the ‘right’ religion... they often deny scientific evidence that contradicts their archaic holy books, they sometimes oppress those who disagree with them, and they alwa...
Fredrick gazed into the deep blue eyes of Jackson for a few seconds before answering. “I’d like the best room in the hotel.” “We have hundreds of rooms here, and all of them are the best.” “How can they all be number one? Only one c...
What an irony it is that these living beings whose shade we sit in, whose fruit we eat, whose limbs we climb, whose roots we water, to whom most of us rarely give a second thought, are so poorly understood. We need to come, as soon as possible, to a ...
Maybe that's what Hell is, in the end. All of your wrongful shit played out there in front of you while you're being pumped from behind by someone you've hurt. That you've screwed over in life. Or worse, worse still...some person who doesn't really l...
Life isn't happily ever after & golden sunsets & shit like that. It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that & maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be...
Wonder why we can do this,' he called out with his mind. The mental effort of speaking to her was already straining—he felt a headache forming like a bulge in his brain. 'Maybe we were lovers,' Teresa said. Thomas tripped and crashed to the ground....
In the cities of the European Franks, women roam about exposing not only their faces, but also their brightly shining hair (after their necks, their most attractive feature), their arms, their beautiful throats, and even, if what Ive heard is true, a...
Walk into any church, and you will see people swimming in a sea of emotions (everything from shame and guilt to love and ecstasy). That may be the reason some people think that the more emotional they are, the more spiritual they are. But, as we will...
Where exactly does it come from, I’d like to know, this ineradicable attitude of superiority toward the past? This stubbornly dumb, can’t-kill-it-with-an-ax conviction that we, the now, critically and categorically know better than they, the past...
In reality, mankind is still metaphysically in God’s likeness, but God’s image in mankind has been altered by sin. We can no longer duplicate or reflect God’s attitudes as we once could do. That is, we can no longer be holy as God is holy. Our ...
It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemb...
All of us had problems, it seemed, whose sources were untraceable, crossing over one another like the trajectories of countless raindrops in a storm, blending to create a fog of delusion and counter-delusion. Powerful forces and connections were undo...
