Random Internet Gems

Found a surprising number of treasures strewn about the World Wide Web today, and thought I'd share:

From some thoughts (for his glory and our joy):
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploitexploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.”
(From The Weight of Glory, available here.)

From bjk at In The Quiet:
"What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

From Whispering Word:
So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, The crawling locust, The consuming locust, And the chewing locust,…. Joel 2:25

From Artistic Theologue:
Jim Elliot used to love to quote the Gold Rush era poet Robert Service. This excerpt from Service’s “The Call Of The Wild“–which Elliot loved–tells us that God is calling us to something, Someone far greater than the religious status quo will settle for:

“They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching,
They have soaked you in convention through and through;
They have put you in a showcase; you’re a credit to their teaching –
But can’t you hear the Wild? — it’s calling you.
Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There’s a whisper on the night-wind, there’s a star agleam to guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling. . .let us go.”

We serve a God who calls to the wild in us. He’s a lion. And as C.S. Lewis wrote of Him–typified by Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe–“Safe? ‘Course He’s not safe. But He’s good.” This wild to which the Lion of Judah calls us is not the wildness of living fast and loose. Not the wildness of an undisciplined and reprehensible life. But the wildness of living wholly and obediently within the full character of God–His love and His holiness; His goodness and severity; His mercy and His judgement; His kindness and His wrath. Our God is holy. He is to be feared and had in reverence by His people. Only a God like that is worthy of our worship and obedience. A “God” who simply speaks of soft, easy, smooth, fun and enjoyable things is not the God we find in the pages of scripture. A.W. Tozer used to say that God always acts like Himself. This Wild One is calling you today to join Him in that wild, sometimes barren and unpredictable place where He is….