Pursuit

by Stephen Dobyns

Each thing I do I rush through so I can do
something else. In such a way do the days pass—
a blend of stock car racing and the never
ending building of a gothic cathedral.
Through the windows of my speeding car, I see
all that I love falling away: books unread,
jokes untold, landscapes unvisited. And why?
What treasure do I expect in my future?
Rather it is the confusion of childhood
loping behind me, the chaos in the mind,
the failure chipping away at each success.
Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape
and so move forward, as someone in the woods
at night might hear the sound of approaching feet
and stop to listen; then, instead of silence
he hears some creature trying to be silent.
What else can he do but run? Rushing blindly
down the path, stumbling, struck in the face by sticks;
the other ever closer, yet not really
hurrying or out of breath, teasing its kill.

Trust Me, you want to hear this

Especially if you have a "Special Needs" child



http://youtu.be/gv4c9NHg3sQ

Quote of the Day

"A friendship that can end never really began" 

- Publilius Syrus

Rose Colored Glasses

by Kenneth Rexroth

Ten years, and it's still on the 
Radio. La Vie en rose
Spills out of a dozen windows
Onto the canal. A woman
And her son in a vegetable
Barge sing it. A man polishing
The prow of his gondola
Sings it while his dog wags its tail.
Children playing hopscotch sing it.
Grimy half washed clothes hang overhead.
Garbage floats in the narrow canal.
More radios join in. Across
The canal, beyond the iron windows
Of the Women's Prison, a hundred
Pure voices of pickpockets
And prostitutes start to sing it.
It is just like being in church.
The next number is Ciao, ciao, bambina.

On Ministry

This is a great article on Ed Dobson. If you aren't familiar with the name, check out this short Wiki article.

Then watch this:

 

Quote of the Day

"Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless." 

- Bill Watterson

I’d Rather be the Father

by Faith Shearin

Right from the start, it's easier to be the father: no morning
nausea, no stretch marks. You can wait outside the


delivery room and keep your clothes on. Notice how
closely the word mother resembles smother, notice


how she is either too strict or too lenient: wrong for giving up
everything or not enough. Psychology books blame her


for whatever is the matter with all of us while the father
slips into the next room for a beer. I wanted to be


the rational one, the one who told a joke at dinner.
If I were her father we would throw a ball across


the lawn while the grill fills with smoke. But who
wants to be the mother? Who wants to tell her what


to wear and deliver her to the beauty shop and explain
bras and tampons? Who wants to show her what


a woman still is? I am supposed to teach her how to
wash the dishes and do the laundry only I don't want


her to grow up and be like me. I'd rather be the father
who tells her she is loved; I'd rather take her fishing


and teach her to skip stones across the lake of history;
I'd rather show her how far she can spit.

Quote of the Day

I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.

- W. Somerset Maugham

Quote of the Day

“My daughter is `10 years old and has come home on more than one occasion recounting an incident at school in which she was teased or harassed by a male classmate.  There has been several times when someone that she was retelling the story to responded with the old, “that just means he likes you” line.  Wrong.  I want my daughter to know that being disrespected is NEVER acceptable.  I want my daughter to know that if someone likes her and respects her, much less LOVES her, they don’t hurt her and they don’t put her down.  I want my daughter to know that the  boy called her ugly or pushed her or pulled her hair didn’t do it because he admires her, it is because he is a little asshole and assholes are an occurrence of society that  will have to be dealt with for the rest of her life. “ 

- Sarah Bessey

Quote of the Day

“...The problem with the church is not strong women, but weak men who can’t handle strong women, much less tolerate women in ministry.”

 - Ben Witherington

The Same Cold

by Stephen Dunn

In Minnesota the serious cold arrived
like no cold I'd previously experienced,
an in-your-face honesty to it, a clarity
that always took me by surprise.
On blizzard nights with wires down
or in the dead-battery dawn
the cold made good neighbors of us all,
made us moral because we might need
something moral in return, no hitchhiker
left on the road, not even some frozen
strange-looking stranger turned away
from our door. After a spell of it,
I remember, zero would feel warm—
people out for walks, jackets open,
ice fishermen in the glory
of their shacks moved to Nordic song.
The cold took over our lives,
lived in every conversation, as compelling
as local dirt or local sport.
If bitten by it, stranded somewhere,
a person would want
to lie right down in it and sleep.
Come February, some of us needed
to scream, hurt ourselves, divorce.
Once, on Route 23, thirty below,
my Maverick seized up, and a man
with a blanket and a candy bar, a man
for all weather, stopped and drove me home.
It was no big thing to him, the savior.
Just two men, he said, in the same cold.

Quote of the Day

Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.

- Charles M. Schultz

Awwwwww . . . . .

http://youtu.be/X60zhjvMqCs

Cook

by Jane Hirshfield

Each night you come home with five continents on your hands:
garlic, olive oil, saffron, anise, coriander, tea,
your fingernails blackened with a marjoram and thyme.
Sometimes the zucchini's flesh seems like a fish-steak,
cut into neat filets, or the salt-rubbed eggplant
yields not bitter water, but dark mystery.
You cut everything into bits.
No core, no kernel, no seed is scared: you cut
onions for hours and do not cry,
cut them to thin transparencies, the red ones
spreading before you like fallen flowers;
you cut scallions from white to green, you cut
radishes, apples, broccoli, you cut oranges, watercress,
romaine, you cut your fingers, you cut and cut
beyond the heart of things, where
nothing remains, and you cut that too, scoring coup
on the butcherblock, leaving your mark,
when you go 
your feet are as pounded as brioche dough.

Quote of the Day

"If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I'd despise the one who gave up." 

 - Abraham Maslow

Quote of the Day

The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career 

- CS Lewis

Quote of the Day

If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity. 

- CS Lewis

Quote of the Day

If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep.

- Dale Carnegie

Quote of the Day

"If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you." 

- Billy Wilder

Quote of the Day

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Watch This: It Will Make You a Better Person

Mr. Happy Man from Matt Morris Films on Vimeo.
http://vimeo.com/mattmorrisfilms/mrhappyman

ADORABLE

http://youtu.be/Nf3MM7jzkZw

Quote of the Day

Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.

- John Clapham

Sonnet 116, 56

by William Shakespeare

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
Within his bending sickle's compass come; 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Sonnet 56

Sweet love, renew thy force be it not said 
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite, 
Which but to-day by feeding is allayed, 
To-morrow sharpened in his former might.
So, love, be thou, although to-day thou fill 
Thy hungry eyes, even till they wink with fullness,
To-morrow see again, and do not kill 
The spirit of love with a perpetual dullness.
Let this sad interim like the ocean be 
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that, when they see: 
Return of love, more blest may be the view; 
Or call it winter, which being full of care 
Makes summer's welcome thrice more wished, more rare.

Let the Earth Quake

http://youtu.be/aIh7Wl0rZvg

Name That Career

If I told you a person had these three skills:

- A dynamic presenter / trainer who is able to simplify complex concepts in a way that makes them accessible, interesting and applicable
- An engaged listener / counselor who helps bring actionable clarity to people who are anxious and confused
- A resourceful independent student with a thirst for new knowledge

And These three basis of knowledge:

 - Inspirational Public Speaking
 - Teaching
 - Spiritual Counseling and training

What three careers first come to mind?

(I'm asking for a "friend")

Christianity ought to have a cruciform feel, not a masculine one

What the church needs now is not by any means a ‘masculine feel.’  The church has had this broken and un-balanced “feel” for millennia and far from producing a “flourishing [for] both men and women” it has too often been complicit in a systematic de-humanization of half its constituency.  When masculinity becomes the virtue par excellence the value of what it means to be a woman or “feminine” is mortally undercut.  What the church desperately needs now is a prophetic voice reminding us to value both men and women as equally and wholly made in the imago dei. At the risk of sounding patronizingly obvious, this can not happen when the biblical text is intentionally re-written to exclude women and it can not happen when one aspect of God’s view of humankind is exclusively staged to norm the other.  Christianity ought to have a cruciform feel, not a masculine one.”


- Lindsey Hankins

Tired Old World

by Ann Reed



If my heart
Fails to break
At the sight of incredible pain
Then this tired old world
This crazy time
Is havin' it's way


If my mind
Understands
Ev'ry ruthless & poisonous act
Then this tired old world
This crazy time
Is havin' it's way


To love & to comfort has meaning I never had known
There's some people fighting their way
Through this life all alone
If I cannot feel something for anyone's struggles it tells
I've lost my compassion & mercy as well as myself


If my eyes
Turn away
Just because I've had enough for one day
Then this tired old world
This crazy time
Is havin' it's way


If my life
On from here
Is a life lived & driven by fear
Then this tired old world
This crazy time
Is havin' it's way


If I ever get to a time when it don't bother me
To bury my friends or watch somebody die in the street
If I don't feel much more than disgust or a shrug or oh well
Then I've lost my compassion & mercy as well as myself


If my heart
Fails to break
At the sight of incredible pain
Then this tired old world
This crazy time
Is havin' it's way...

Unable to find

by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

             the right way to get out of bed,
we watch the shades cut down
into thin slices, waver a while,
shoulder to shoulder, then join, lazy.


             Let's leave this room now: it's given us
all it can, let's go—it's Sunday—have
breakfast out, find a table for two: two eggs,
two toast, two coffees—black. No, nothing


             plain: latté. We'll read the paper,
the story of a man who rescued the only thing
he wanted from the rubble of his collapsed shack:
his cat—and be moved by it, and like that;


             or play hangman on our paper napkins,
find easy words—no double-meanings: day,
night, rivers... then send the game to its fate,
crumpled on our empty plates. 


             Let's step inside a church, sit through a wedding,
a christening, a mass for the dead, but leave
before the last amen. We'll take the long way home,
make plans for summer—winter even.

Quote of the Day

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world 

- CS Lewis

The "Other" Blog

Yes, there is another blog. It is a Resource Guide for parents of special needs children that I have been haphazardly working on for a while.

I recently made some updates and have been encouraged by some to post a link here on TDR in case regular readers are not aware of it.

Enjoy and I hope it is helpful!

Quote of the Day

Sincerity is what matters. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

- Bob Hope

Exegesis

by Paul Hostovsky

We couldn't have been more than twelve
or thirteen, sitting on that green bench in the late
sixties or early seventies, me and Michael Zucker
who was much more savvy and world-weary
than I, when I asked him to please explain
the meaning of the words to a song by Carly
Simon, who was simply gorgeous—that much was
plain—after we'd resolved the essential question
of whether or not she was wearing a bra
in that photo of her with the blue top and thick
lips on her album cover. "I don't get it," I said.
"'You're so vain. You probably think this song is about you.'
But the song IS about him, isn't it?" I asked Zucker,
holding my palm up in the air like one who is
trying to ascertain the truth about whether or not
it has started to rain. Zucker looked away then,
gingerly fingering the green slats, as though he were
reading the carved names of the lovers and obscenities
tactually. Then he took a deep breath and exhaled
miserably, took the album cover out of my hands
and gazed awhile at Carly Simon who was gorgeous,
famous, braless, and older than me and Zucker put together.
"That's the point," he said. "She's in love with him."

Quote of the Day

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” 

 – Galatians 3:28

Quote of the Day

“Masculine Christianity? Feminine Christianity? Look, I'm not a Christian, but even asking the question seems to me to be profoundly missing the point. What I'd most like to see, myself, is a humane Christianity. Every time I hear someone start talking about how Christianity needs to be more 'manly' or 'masculine' - or, by contrast, less effeminate - it seems to come at the cost of basic politeness and human decency, of empathy and forgiveness. It's gotten to the point where I assume that anyone who says that basically just wants permission to be more of a prick than the traditional reading of the Gospels says that they should be (i.e. not at all). The more of this "manly" Christianity I see, the more I'm convinced that it's just a cover for bad behavior, motivated by a misguided longing for a certain sort of machismo that Jesus neither endorsed nor practiced.” - Michael Mock

This is the Most Brilliant Band Out there

http://youtu.be/MejbOFk7H6c

He Gets Around to Answering the Old Question

by Miller Williams

He doesn't see as well as he thinks he remembers.
His fingers sometimes find it hard to bend.
He often can't find the name to go with a face.
Sometimes he doesn't hear but decides to pretend.


Weekends, week by week, are closer together.
Sometimes he has to sit down to put on his pants.
No lady seems to mind if he calls her Honey,
never grins nor even throws a glance.


Sometimes he's told himself what all this means.
"Every year some more of me is dead,
but there's a lot of stuff still left to collapse."
He started to laugh but talked to himself instead.


"Think of yourself as a plumbing system, a clock.
As soon as you're done, you start to come undone.
It's almost interesting when you pay attention,
how working parts stop working, one by one.


So now you've asked me the oldest question of all.
You want to know how I'm doing. I told you before,
I'm dying. Been at it for years. Still, I think
I could hang a few more calendars on the door."

Misgivings

by William Matthews

"Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,


but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can't
control is what we could; those drab,
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may augur we're on our owns


for good reasons. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door, "you're home."
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-


in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.

Quote of the Day

Provocation does not make me ill-tempered; it only shows me how ill-tempered I am 

 - CS Lewis

Quote of the Day

I have learned that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more 

- CS Lewis