C.S. Lewis, "As The Ruin Falls"

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love – a scholar's parrot may talk Greek –
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

Hormones

I'm having a brief sabbatical this weekend as Jane has her sister Lois over and two of Lois' sister-in-laws - Jan and Ginny. They're all catching up after several years apart, I'm sure reminiscing about teen years spent together at a Brethren camp near Timmins. Anyway, I've been invited to find other things to do and places to be. So I taped video greetings yesterday for a new Chinese church building expansion banquet (that I can't attend) and then spent the afternoon, with my Mom, visiting my Dad at CAMA Woodland nursing home. He was quite lucid in some ways, for a change - though in and out of sleep. Thought at first I was his brother (Bert, who's been dead for several years - which doesn't say much for my facial colouring) but then thanked me for coming, calling me Laurie when I was leaving. Stayed overnight with friends in Hamilton and, because I have a really sore back, didn't go to church with them - which adds to my being stiffnecked and perverse, I suppose. Soup for lunch and then home to Jane, and to a house empty of 'sisters' - but I'm sure with a lingering aura of hormones. Ah, well.

Only Jesus

When there are no answers, only mystery, and when the road seems closed and all bridges back and forward appear to be washed away, one turns to the Friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Choices

Sometimes you feel that whatever you do, you just cannot win. Speaking to a graduating class a few years ago, Woody Allen said to the graduates: "More than any other time in its history humankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly." We've all had days when we feel like that. Question is - what to do about them?

The World is Flat

That's the title of a book by Pulitzer prize winner Thomas L. Friedman, subtitled: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. This is an astounding book that, as the blurb has it - "helps you see things in a new way." Friedman writes for the New York Times where he is the foreign affairs columnist. The lightning fast and changing times in which we live reflect incredible advances in technology and communications. The globe has shrunk, time zones have become almost meaningless. Now, the new and remarkable convergences of things like weblogs, the internet, global out-sourcing and in-sourcing have created a new world for commerce, knowledge, and nearly every other aspect of life on this planet. Globalization, again as the blurb has it, "has shifted into warp-drive." This book is must reading for present global understanding and future-think implications.