Friday, March 21, 2008

"Homemaking -– being a full-time wife and mother –- is not a destructive drought of uselessness but an overflowing oasis of opportunity; it is not a dreary cell to contain your talents and skills but a brilliant catalyst to channel creativity and energies into meaningful work; it is not a rope for binding your productivity in the marketplace, but reins for guiding your posterity in the home; it is not an oppressive restrain of intellectual prowess for the community, but a release of wise instruction to your own household; it is not the bitter assignment of inferiority to your person, but the bright assurance of the ingenuity of God's plan for complementarity of the sexes, especially as worked out in God's plan for marriage; it is neither limitation of gifts available nor stinginess in distributing the benefits of those gifts, but rather the multiplication of a mother's legacy to the generations to come and the generous bestowal of all God meant a mother to give to those He entrusted to her care."

-Dorothy Kelley Patterson, Where's Mom? The High Calling of Wives and Mothers, pg. 47

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Words

"Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."
George Eliot

Their religion is a great, soft cushion.

Rev John Stott of London, wrote, “Thousands of people still ignore Christ’s warning and undertake to follow him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so-called 'nominal Christianity.' In countries to which Christian civilisation has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent, but thin, veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved; enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great, soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life, while changing its place and shape to suit their convenience. No wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism.”

John R.W. Stott “BASIC CHRISTIANITY.” IVF 1958 p108.