litlover12

Look at this gorgeous personalized graphic msantimacassar made me! I love it!! *jumps up and down*

And she's taking requests over at her LJ if you'd like one of your own!

It's now been more than a year since I started attending the little Anglican church. (I thought it was a year this month, but looking back through this journal, looks like it was actually a year last month.) No regrets. Even though it was so hard to leave my former church -- and even though I have a rather long drive every Sunday morning -- no regrets AT ALL. The church is great, the pastor is fantastic, and I come home every Sunday happy instead of miserable. One of the best things I ever did.

I only wish all the people I left at the old church could get out, and find better churches too . . . but that's up to them, not me.

Just popping in for a minute to share a bit of good news: Some of you know I'm writing a book about faith and singleness. (I've been writing it for quite some time, actually, as it's been going rather slowly.) On Monday, I got an agent! She's going to start submitting my proposal to publishers soon.

. . . Which means I have to get busy and get this thing written!!

*pops back out*

For the third year in a row, I'm giving up staying up late at night for Lent. Don't laugh -- it's the best I could do. I don't think it's humanly possible for me to give up chocolate or sugar or coffee or any of those things that a lot of people give up. Just a slave of the gastronomical passions, that's me.

But believe me, giving up my late nights is no walk in the park. It seems to get harder every year, in fact. It's been so hard this year that I've been wondering if it's not too late to go back and pick something else to give up (don't ask me what, I haven't really thought this through).

Though I'm relatively new to Lent, however, I'm pretty sure there's no take backsies. Guess I'm stuck with it. At least it's good for me, though that's not much consolation when I want to read just one more page or watch five more minutes of TV or or or . . .

"I have heard a man maintain that 'the importance of the Resurrection is that it proves survival'. Such a view cannot at any point be reconciled with the language of the New Testament. On such a view Christ would simply have done what all men do when they die: the only novelty would have been that in His case we were allowed to see it happening. But there is not in Scripture the faintest suggestion that the Resurrection was new evidence for something that had in fact been always happening. The New Testament writers speak as if Christ's achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the 'first fruits', the 'pioneer of life'. He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has opened."

C. S. Lewis, Miracles

I've been working on this article for a long time (in my head, that is), and I finally got it written and posted this week.

My boss, who's Catholic, liked it a lot. Yesterday it came up again while we were on the phone, and he joked, "Your grandfather would be so proud of you if you'd just become a Catholic!"

I just laughed. But if I'd thought faster -- and if we hadn't been on a conference call -- I might have said, "No. He couldn't ever have been prouder of me than he was. He was always proud of me, no matter what."

But on second thought, my boss doesn't need to know that. It's enough that I know it.

That Billy Graham special on TV tonight just blew me away. That is a man of God and no mistake.

Here it is in case you missed it.

"On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn."

G. K. Chesterton

(Thanks to my friend Christy for the picture and the quote!)