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Thanks for stopping by, whether you got here by a link or hitting "next blog" -- I am glad you are here. I've also done some writing on homeschooling, and what I learned thinking I was teaching.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Decking the Hall


All around me – lights beaming, gaily decorating trees and buildings; familiar carols resounding on the public radio station; reconnecting with family and friends – the Winter Solstice soon upon us never fails to rev me up. 

Fast away the old year passes . . .”

We attended a pageant celebrating Christmas, hosted by the tutorial overseeing our grandchildren’s schooling. Children’s sweet faces and voices, their earnest performances – expressing the hope and joy of the season: God so loved us He gave us His Son.   

But, like so many Christmases past, the brilliance of the season, both secular and sacred, contrasts with the dark reality of disease, despair and depravity. MS and cancer haven’t taken the holiday off – nor has the anger and dysfunction, disrupting too many families disappeared just because it’s Christmas. 

Life hurts!

And if the pain of living were not enough, a few people have figured out how to silence those who object to their conduct, which defies God. Folks, all for whom that Baby came, whose political correctness reacts and punishes a Christian’s comment on the obvious, do nothing when their government rewards itself at the expense of those who fought to protect its citizens. (Are We That Cruel?) All the lights of the season do not seem to illuminate our minds to see how dark the darkness is. (The Culture of Death, continued)

Bah-Hug!  

Making sense of suffering, I can’t, apart from the hope that an infinite personal God chose to involve Himself in the world and lives of all He created.

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed, that it will make it not only  possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened. (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, chapter 34. Cited by Tim Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, page 154.) 

Morning Has Broken

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