Nice is Not enough

‘Niceness’ - wholesome, integrated personality - is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up ‘nice’; just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat. But we must not supposed that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls.

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world- and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.

It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do soL and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders - no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings- may even give it an awkward appearance.

from Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis

Love is there if you want it to be, you just have to see that it's wrapped in beauty and hidden away between the seconds of your life. If you don't stop for a minute you might miss it.....

- today I realized I wanted you to grow old with me.

“the stillness of soul is increasingly rare in this world addicted to speed and noise.”

she rode.

And she rode and rode and rode. As she pedaled, letting the wind and sun steal kisses on her cheek, a funny thing happened. With every pedal forward, every move in one direction, she unleashed the pieces of her past she drug for so long and left them in her wake. So she rode and rode and rode, until the only thing she carried on her shoulders was the weight of the dancing sun.

32.

I'm not trying to give my life meaning
by demeaning you
and I would like to state for the record
I did everything that I could do
I'm not saying that I'm a saint
I just don't want to live that way
no, I will never be a saint
but I will always say

squint your eyes and look closer
I'm not between you and your ambition
I am a poster girl with no poster
I am thirty-two flavors and then some
And I'm beyond your peripheral vision
So you might want to turn your head
Cause someday you might find you're starving
and eating all of the words you said -ad

oh.

“yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. what is your life? for you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. instead you ought to say, ’if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” james 4:14-15

My wish for you this weekend, is that you find rest and comfort in knowing that you - in your beautiful uniqueness - are so deeply loved by our compassionate God.

i know your hands will clap.

blessed are those whose lives unfold in wings, the butterflies, and those whom the moonbeams fall.