“He took what is mine in order that He might impart to me what is His.
He took it not to overturn it but to fill it.”
St. Ambrose
(Cades Cove, TN / Julie Cook / 2015)
We must animate ourselves by the thought that God is always with us,
that he only allows this trial for our greater good,
and that we have not necessarily lost his grace because
we have lost the taste and feelings of it.
St. Ignatius of Loyola
The Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle,
the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time,
what is uncreated, eternal, come into nature, into human nature,
descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him.
It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away there
is nothing specifically Christian left.
C.S. Lewis
(a golden red carpet / Cades Cove, TN / The Great Smokey Mountains National Park /
Julie Cook / 2015)
(an advent post from 2015)
Advent—the season of waiting, watching and expectancy…
As in waiting and watching with expectant anticipation.
With the anticipation being so wonderful, so indescribable,
so over the top…you can barely contain yourself.
This is not the worrisome dreading sort of waiting.
Not the “oh no we’ll never make it” gloom and doom of the negative waiting.
Not the looking constantly over your shoulder with fear rising up from the pit
of your stomach while you fret waiting for the other shoe to drop sort
of the anxious dreading type of waiting, watching, looking,
fretting and worrying…
This is rather the oh so great and oh so grand magnificent, I can’t wait,
I’m so excited, as this is going to be really really good and really really big…
full of sheer giddiness that I’m about to explode sort of joyful
waiting and watching…
As in I can’t wait because there is going to be such wonder,
relief and good things that all thoughts of bad, negative,
dread and woe are simply nonexistent…
Yet is this the season that you’re all excited and giddy over because of the
getting and receiving of more stuff?
The I can’t wait to go to the mall and bask in the holiday specialness
and magic of mega retail savviness sort of excited…??
Is it because this is the season you’ve long awaited because of the gathering
and the getting of those gifts and presents and all manner of things
that you’ve decided you just can’t live without sort of season…??
Is it the season that you’ve been long waiting and watching for as
your calendar will now be filling up with all manner of parties,
gatherings, galas and events…each offering the excuse of buying shiny and
sparkly outfits with the expectancy of seeing and being seen while
you imagine all the goodies to be sampled and savored…??
Is your watchfulness, your waiting, your expectancy over those things of this planet,
this world, this generation’s idea of a good time?
Or is your watchfulness, your waiting, your expectancy over something else?
Something that is much bigger, more awesome, more unimaginable and more over the top
than any of things of this life…
those things and events which pale in comparison as they are simply fleeting
and merely passing by…
For there is something really big and really monumental that is soon
to be taking place and for those of us who wait, who watch, who look,
who anticipate, who are full of expectancy, wonder and awe….
well, we are not to be disappointed…
“God travels wonderful ways with human beings,
but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people.
God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him;
rather, his way is beyond all comprehension,
free and self-determined beyond all proof.
Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels,
where our piety anxiously keeps us away:
that is precisely where God loves to be.
There he confounds the reason of the reasonable;
there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be,
and no one can keep him from it.
Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous
that he does wonders where people despair,
that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous.
And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…
God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings.
God marches right in.
He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where
one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost,
the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas
“The measure of love is to love without measure.”
St. Francis de Sales
(wild turkey Cades Cove, The Great Smokies National Park, Tennessee /Julie Coo / 2015)
****It’s time to resume taking our place in our small family’s yearly pilgrimage…
and since I will be out of pocket for the next few days, I’ve
opted to revisit a previous post from 2016—I needed to re-read this post
for all sorts of reasons—if not simply to be reminded that there is so much more
then my narrow sighted surroundings…remember, we must all remain grateful…
Enjoy a rediscovered moment seemingly lost in time…
Late one afternoon last week, I had a doctor’s appointment.
It was one of those late in the day appointments…
the kind of appointment that puts a kink in the entire day….
as in you have to be dressed and ready to go all the while making
certain that you aren’t doing anything else that causes you to overrun
the appointed time.
You know how doctor’s offices can be…
Either they scold you for running late…
as in the receptionist will either actually say something about how you’ve
messed up everyone else by being late,
or rather she will just give you that stare of annoyment while curtly
asking for your insurance information.
Or even worse…they’ll fine you for missing the appointment because
they canceled it when you weren’t there on the dot.
Never mind that you will proceed to sit for hours waiting to finally be seen
despite your punctuality.
I arrived right on time but noticed that the office seemed rather
sparse for that time of day.
This was actually an appointment that had to be rescheduled following my nerve block
as the two coincided and they couldn’t work me in for a solid month,
so I’ve had to wait and wait….
I am happy I wasn’t in total dire straights.
The receptionist asked which doctor I was to see.
When I told her she informed me that he was actually in a different office
in another town that day.
Huh?
“What’s your birthday so I can look up your time…”
I gave it to her while I was now almost certain that for some reason,
maybe the fact that my brain no longer worked,
the appointment was actually to be the following day…
the day I was having to be Atlanta with Dad.
Sure enough it was.
Despite my having gotten the text to confirm the day and time…
despite that the date being marked on my calendar and
despite my cell phone alerting me when to go…
So since I now had to cancel the now following day’s appointment, again,
as I had to be with Dad,
the earliest available was not for another full month…
maybe by then I will be or won’t be in dire straights…
Anywhoo, I exited the office now mad.
Mad at myself…
mad at my crazy life…
and mad that the doctor can’t seem to see me for months at a time…
Aggravated, I got in the elevator with my nose to my phone making certain
I was putting the new date and time in correctly.
I was so preoccupied that I didn’t notice the man coming out of the
same office I had just exited,
right behind me as he entered the elevetaor with me.
I pushed the ground floor and was taken aback a bit when I realized I wasn’t alone.
I asked the gentleman which floor he needed.
He told me the ground floor.
We all know how awkward it can be with just two strangers on an elevator together…
as in what do you say, what to you do, where do you look…I put down my phone and
asked my elevator mate if he was having a good day.
“Oh yes mam I am” he said with a distinct country accent.
Here in the south, true southerners either have a deep southern drawl
or one that is what is considered to be more country than southern.
Much to my mother’s disdain, when she first met my husband,
who was at the time my fiancé of their first meeting,
his accent was and still is more country than was her very genteel southern intonation.
My elevator mate was wearing a green and white checked shirt, neatly tucked into his
nicely pressed blue jeans.
He was an older black man, graying throughout his neatly cut hair.
He was rather thin yet spry and was squinting in the dimly lit elevator…
all the while ginning from ear to ear.
He continued…
“I don’t have to come back for 6 more months cause I just got me a
good report from the doctor.”
“That’s great!” I injected, genuinely happy for him because I know all too well
about those bad reports.
“Ever since that operation when he cut on my stomach,
I’ve quit hurting and I”ve gained 10 pounds in a month’s time!
I aint scrawny no more!!!” he proudly boasted.
I told him that that was great and now he’d be able to truly enjoy his Thanksgiving.
“Oh yes mam I plan to…”
By now we were both making our way toward the parking lot.
As we exited the building, I noticed that it was a very warm late fall afternoon.
The sun was shining yet heading deep toward the west…
all the while a warm breeze blowing.
“Isn’t it a beautiful day” he announced more than asked…
as I respond that that indeed it was.
I added “it certainly doesnt feel very fall-like since we’ve not had any fall
or winter-like weather.
“Well that’s about to change this weekend because it’s going to be cold on Sunday.”
“Really?”
I’ve not paid much attention to the weather as of late as we are in an extremely
unseasonable spell of warm weather that is actually hot and dangerously dry.
“Yes mam, but until then, you enjoy this nice weather and you have yourself a
good Thanksgiving holiday.”
“And I hope you do too….”
And with that we went our separate ways.
Suddenly I forgot that I had been mad, aggravated or feeling frustrated that
I’d wasted the better part of the day with stupidity…
Because in that elevator, I had met a spry and happy reminder to the things in our
lives that truly matter….
and it didn’t have anything to do with missed appointments…
or maybe…it really did…
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation,
by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
Philippines 4:6
“Only after all the noise has spent itself do we begin to hear
in the silence of our hearts, the voice of God.”
A.W. Tozer
(Cades Cove / Julie Cook / 2021)
A man’s soul is as full of voices as a forest;
there are ten thousand tongues there like all the tongues of the trees:
fancies, follies, memories, madnesses, mysterious fears, and more mysterious hopes.
All sanity in life consists in coming to the conclusion that some of those
voices have authority and others do not.
G. K. Chesterton
quoted in Dale Ahlquist’s book The Complete Thinker
Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement,
and death will be part of your journey,
but the Kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors.
No evil can resist grace forever.
Brennan Mannin
(my favorite place on earth—the old Methodist Church in Cades Cove/
The Great Smokey Mts National Park / Julie Cook / 2021)
Have you ever felt that switch flip?
You know the one…
The switch which flips you from upside down to right side up?
As in all of a sudden, there is some sort of vast difference
between now and then.
Something new is now residing in your soul while the old has been
blessedly removed.
As an unseen presence now lifts you ever upward.
One day you’re one way…and then suddenly, the very next day,
you’re something else entirely.
You’re simply not the same person today as you were yesterday.
And thank God you’re not.
It is that odd juxtaposition of a before and an after sort of flip of the switch.
A profound difference begins to resonate within your inner core.
As in…there was first angst and emptiness…and then next there
grew a blessed peace and a sense of being sweetly content.
A huge difference happening all within a single 1 minute.
Marvelously, actually miraculously, you feel a peace that had been
nonexistent just one minute prior.
This new comforting sense of peace that, had been so elusive for such a long time–
longer than you could recall, now wraps you in a soothing embrace.
And so now you actually find yourself finally being able to exhale.
Being able to exhale the heaviness of forever,
while then breathing in a fresh new air of life.
The body goes weak.
The soul has been broken.
And now…we are the better for it…
as I think we call that loving Grace…
Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul,
the golden link which binds us to duty and truth,
the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life,
and is prophetic of eternal good.
Petrarch
God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things which should be changed and the wisdom
to distinguish the one from the other.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid
and durable happiness there is in our lives.
C. S. Lewis
(Cades Cove / Julie Cook / 2015)
“We should recall that no man is an island, entire of itself.
Our lives are involved with one another, through innumerable interactions
they are linked together.
No one lives alone.
No one sins alone.
No one is saved alone.
The lives of others continually spill over into mine:
in what I think, say, and do, and achieve.
And conversely, my life spills over into that of others:
for better or for worse.
So my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that person,
something external, not even after death.”
Pope Benedict XVI
An Excerpt From
Pope Benedict XVI
“God writes his name on the soul of every man.”
Venerable Fulton Sheen
(Cades Cove / Julie Cook / 2015)
“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises
to the contemplation of truth;
and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word,
to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God,
men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”
Pope St. John Paul II
“To use this life well is the pathway through death to everlasting life.”
St. John Almond
(Methodist Chruch, Cades Cove /The Great Smokey Mt.s National Park / Julie Cook / 2015)
“Even if you do not confess, God is not ignorant of the deed,
since he knew it before it was committed.
Why then do you not speak of it?
Does the transgression become heavier by the confession?
No, it becomes lighter and less troublesome.
And this is why he wants you to confess:
not that you should be punished, but that you should be forgiven;
not that he may learn your sin—how could that be, since he has seen it?—
but that you may learn what favor he bestows.
He wishes you to learn the greatness of his grace,
so that you may praise him perfectly, that you may be slower to sin,
that you may be quicker to virtue.
And if you do not confess the greatness of the need,
you will not understand the enormous magnitude of his grace.”
St. John Chrysostom, p. 255
An Excerpt From
A Year with Church Fathers
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—
his eternal power and divine nature—
have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made,
so that people are without excuse.
Romans 1:20 NIV
(a wagon of days gone by / Cables Mill, Cades Cove / Julie Cook / 2020)
“The difficulties of life do not have to be unbearable.
It is the way we look at them – through faith or unbelief –
that makes them seem so. We must be convinced that our Father is full of love for us
and that He only permits trials to come our way for our own good.
Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God.
The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him.
As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him.
We will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy.”
Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
It’s hard for us who live in the West twenty centuries later to appreciate the
meaning of the Book of Revelation.
Our first tendency is to simply plug what we read into our own experiences
without rolling up our sleeves, getting down on our knees,
and trying to understand what it meant back then.
Dr. Scott Hahn
from The End: A Study of the Book of Revelation
(Cades Cove, Cable grist mill / Julie Cook / 20202)
The Book of Revelation has not only a past fulfillment but also an ongoing
fulfillment throughout Christian history.
The fulfillments can be multiple, ever-increasing, escalating, and enlarging.
At some point in the future there will be an even more magnificent
fulfillment of Revelation than there was back in 70 AD.
Dr. Scott Hahn
from The End: A Study of the Book of Revelation
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