stairwell accompaniment:Snow Patrol
i read this:
If Christians had given the traditional 10 percent tithe of their income to their churches in 2004, instead of giving the the 2.56 percent they actually gave, there would have been an additional $164 billion available, according to a report released in October called “The State of Church Giving through 2004.” If the churches chose to funnel just $70-80 billion of that additional income to missions and humanitarian works, the basic needs of every person on the globe would be provided.
stairwell accompaniment:Fiona Apple
These days we have been working on separating cultural Christianity from growing in the likeness of Jesus. And searching for our roles as believers in politics. Defining ourselves less by political parties, hoping to show more of our convictions not just in issues of gay marriage and abortion but more through basic Christian issues of poverty, hunger, AIDS and war. Questioning the role of forgiveness and grace in a war-driven culture. Desiring to travel and see and daily learning contentment in cultivating passion for small pleasures. larger than i have earned. too numerous to be named. Refining what it is to be “co-heirs in the grace of life” with my husband and leaning, living, growing more deeply in love with him. daily. in the minutes. The artistry of marriage that sharpens us into Jesus’ living form.
And autumn is peaking.
stairwell accompaniment:Coldplay
“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot “develop” into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, “with backward mutters of disserving power”–or else not. It is still “either-or.” If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we acccept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most inanimate souveniers of Hell. I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in “the High Countries.” In that sense it will be true for those who have completed the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven in everywhere. But we, at this end of the road, must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision. If we do, we are likely to embrace the false and disasterous converse and fancy that everything is good and everywhere is Heaven.
But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be inthe end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.”
-CS Lewis
onthestairs 