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Did you ever wonder about Mizar in Ps 42–where it was and what was its significance?  (Maybe you didn’t, but have I piqued your curiosity?)  Here’s Amy Carmichael’s take on it:

Ps 42.6  The Hill Mizar

Did you ever feel that you had nothing great enough to be called a trouble, and yet you very much needed help?  I have been finding much encouragement in the hill Mizar.  For Mizar means littleness–the little hill.  The land of Jordan was a place where great floods (the swelling of Jordan) might terrify the soul, and the land of the Hermonites was a place of lions and leopards [FYI: these are the places mentioned in this verse]; but Mizar was only a little hill: and yet the word is, I will “remember You from . . .  the hill Mizar”, from the little hill.

So just where we are, from…

You can hide nothing from God.
The mask you wear before men will do you no good before Him.
He wants to see you as you are,
He wants to be gracious to you.
You do not have to go on lying to yourself and your brothers,
as if you were without sin;
you can dare to be a sinner.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Life Together

One of my Monday morning jobs in our college health clinic is to meet with any student who got so intoxicated they had to spend part of the weekend in the emergency room.  Alcohol poisonings are distressingly common on all college campuses, and ours is no exception.   What I do during our morning-after visit is review the records with the student so they have some idea what took place before they woke up hours later on a gurney in a noisy smelly emergency room– alcohol…

 

Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.
~Hafez, Persian poet

When my heart clenches with sadness, when my thinking is muddled with stress and doubting, when I can’t focus on what is right before me because tears cloud my vision, I remember one thing remains clear in the mist and midst of the fog.

I have need for God and I am softened in my neediness.

A repost:

Today we celebrate the birth of Mary.  I have to say that this morning when I woke up, I felt like breaking into a little song to her, at least “Happy birthday to you . . .”–which sounds so trite–but I knew in my heart that that would be dear to her . . . because she is that kind of Mother.

I want to share the first verse of a poem by Rilke because I think it conveys the sense of joy in the heavens at the birth of this great gift of God to us.

Birth of Mary

O what must it have cost the angels
not suddenly to burst into song, as one bursts into tears,
since indeed they knew: on this night the mother is being
born to the boy, the One, who shall soon appear.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German by…

Here are sweet-peas, on tip-toe for a flight:
With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white,
And taper fingers catching at all things,
To bind them all about with tiny rings.
~John Keats

I grew up watching sweet peas climb a trellis in our family garden. Their delicate tendrils did wrap clinging fingers around anything they could reach and grasp. The blossoms were too ephemeral to bring indoors for a vase on the table — the petals would droop and then drop within a day or so. They were meant to be appreciated right where they grew, so I would visit them regularly, breathe deeply with my nose in their midst to capture and keep their lovely scent with me as I went on about my day, leaving them waving their vines in my wake.

Some things are better left undisturbed, to flourish right where they have taken hold. In…