Round the Sphere Again: Two Quotes on Prayer

Built-In Double Intercession
”Your prayer life is secure in the two hands of the Father.” Quoting The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything by Fred Sanders at Of First Importance.

Peace of God Protection
“We must present our petitions with thanksgiving” in order to prevent our prayer from becoming “nothing but a worry session.” Doug Wilson quotes his own book, Beyond Stateliest Marble (on Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet).

Thankful Thursday

I’m thankful that February’s sun has a little heat to it, so that even though the temperature said -36C this morning, I can count on things warming up substantially during the daylight hours. I’m thankful for the almost four more hours of daylight since the shortest day of the year, and for the bright blue skies that let the sunshine show. I’m thankful for the constantly changing seasons that add variety to my life. Can I mention that I’m thankful for an efficient furnace, too?

I’m thankful for this year’s crop of grapefruit. The sweet grapefruit available in recent weeks are a good gift.

I’m thankful for my daughter and her car, which I’ll be using while she’s gone to Costa Rica to be in a wedding. Hooray for having a car 24/7 again.

I’m thankful that the sovereign God cares for me so that I can cast all my anxieties on him.

Throughout this year I’m planning to post a few thoughts of thanksgiving each Thursday along with Kim at the Upward Call and others.

Round the Sphere Again: From the Women Again

Giving Online Grace
Facebook, says Nicole Starling, can draw us “into the audience of a thousand daily boasts that the modesty of face-to-face etiquette may well have prevented.”  And in that way it can steal our joy when we compare our imperfect lives with what seem to be the more perfect lives of others.

Nicole suggests—and her advice applies to other sorts of online relationships (and real life ones, too)—making

a genuine effort to avoid preening and posturing and a deliberate attempt to ask whether the pattern of my updates (the trivial and newsy, the political and spiritual, the quirky and observational…) adds up to something that ‘gives grace’ to those who read them.

We should also remind ourselves where true joy comes from.

[T]he real source of my joy in God and what He’s done for me, rather than drifting back into the bad addictive habit of chaining my happiness to comparisons with the (artificially constructed) cyber-lives of others.

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