HT: Michael Hyatt

“Every time a poem is written, every time a short story is written, it is not by cunning, but by belief. The beauty, the something, the little charm of the thing to be, is more felt than known. There is a common jest, one that always annoys me, on the writers, that they write the last end first, and then work up to it; that they lay a train toward one sentence that they think is pretty nice and have all fixed up to set like a trap to close with. No, it should not be that way at all. No one who has ever come close to the arts has failed to see the difference between things written that way, with cunning and device, and the kind that are believed into existence, that begin in something more felt than known.

“Now I think — I happen to think — that those three beliefs that I speak of, the self-belief, the love-belief, and the art-belief, are all closely related to the God-belief, that the belief in God is a relationship you enter into with Him to bring about the future.”

Robert Frost, Education in Poetry

HT: Rebecca Reynolds (who is, in my view, a better poet than Frost)

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by Ryan Sheffield

You supply the caption. Wow.

Klettshellir, Iceland (by hó)

I keep snagging these images from Matt Crutchmer’s blog. One thing I love about them is how they reveal that the world we inhabit is already magical. Books on this abound, but two must-reads (seriously!) are Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton and Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl by N.D. Wilson.

HT: Matt Crutchmer

“We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the ‘intolerable compliment.’ Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.”

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Gina has been diligent in her ongoing quest to overwhelm our home with beauty. Simple beauty, yes. But beauty. More and more, as she gets (very teensy) moments, she is remaking this place. It’s like witnessing recreation in miniature. She seems to live out the Theology I feel like I usually just think about. I love her. I’m deeply thankful for her. She’s the best.

We can’t do this. But wow, right? Wowzers.

Source

HT: Matt Crutchmer

Romantic countryside- Finland (by MilaMai)

HT: Matt Crutchmer

HT: Relevant