Posts by Mark

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If I have all faith,
so as to remove mountains,
but have not love,
I am nothing.

1 Corinthians 2:2

Praying with Isaiah

Stop regarding man in whose nostrils is breath,
for of what account is he?”

[Isaiah 2:22]

I give so much weight to people and even to what is being said, built, done, and seen in culture.

Rarely do I stop in a day and consider the majesty of the Lord or what wondrous glory is his character. He has power and control over all nations and he alone has the authority to call everyone an idolatrous sinner who has whored after created gods.

Father, I have done this! My eyes rarely breach my computer screen let alone a rooftop—and far rarer the cityscape. My idols look attractive; I’d like to stay quiet and comfortable as to not be noticed or criticized, but how stifled my worship of you has been! May I rise early in the morning with no music or distraction, but a great need for you and a reminder of how far beyond creation you are, to the point of having mastery over it.

The ox knows its owner, and the donkey knows its master’s crib,
but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.

[Isaiah 1:3]

God, help me understand my owner and my true Home about these houses. None of this is permanent—help me to glean and trim my life to be focused on just a few things for your glory!

Amen

Jan 20

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Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God’s holy ordinance, through which he wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to his glory, and calls into his kingdom. In your love, you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more than something personal—it is a status, an office. Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Aug 21

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We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he “wants a woman.” Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Aug 20