Personally, I am not in the habit of observing Lent in any formal way. I do not give up chocolate or coffee or anything else—at least, not intentionally. But willy-nilly I always end up surrendering something, because that is what Lent does: it drives us, as it did Jesus, into the wilderness.
What follows is a chapter I originally wrote for my book Practicing the Presence of People, but decided at the last minute to drop. Perhaps I felt, at that point in my life, that it was too personal to publish. But now here it is.
Many years ago the Lord revealed to me my besetting sin, and He did so through, of all people, a satanist.
For many years Steve Bell has been in the top rank of Christian singer-songwriters. Now, later in life, he is showing himself also to be a gifted writer of devotional prose.
One day when Fred Rogers was a boy, his grandfather said to him, “You made this day a special day, just by being yourself. Always remember there’s just one person in this whole world like you—and I like you just the way you are.”
The first thing I do at the start of a new year is to clear off my desk—not just to find places for all the physical odds and ends that have accumulated, but to organize my ideas, sorting through the various notebooks and scraps of paper where I’ve jotted down thoughts that came to me on the fly.
Far in the future, a spaceship from Earth approaches a white dwarf star surrounded by clouds of gas from the time it went supernova. On board the ship are scientists, including a Jesuit astrophysicist, sent to investigate the reasons behind the supernova explosion.
On Christmas Eve, 1513, Fra Giovanni Giocondo, a Franciscan friar, wrote the following beautiful letter—what we’d now consider a Christmas card—to his friend and patron Countess Allagia Aldobrandeschi:
Advent is a season short in duration but long in distance. It is the journey of a soul from Nazareth to Bethlehem—a mere hundred miles, yet really the span from here to eternity.
Ever since writing my book about joy, Champagne for the Soul, I’ve continued to collect quotes on the subject of joy. A while back I published a set of these quotes as a blog post. Now here’s a second installment: