I’m a big fan of the poet Rumi. Recently in Toronto I visited the Aga Khan Museum to view a special exhibit celebrating Rumi. Before even entering the beautiful building, one sees a site-specific installation which employs a sentence from Rumi: “There is a voice that does not use words.”
This morning I enjoyed a few moments gazing into my cutlery drawer. I can’t remember ever doing this before. Cutlery is not something one looks at, particularly, it’s just there—useful, shiny, not unattractive, but not noteworthy.
As I head into holiday time, I thought it would be good to invite a guest to write my next blog post. So I asked my friend Chatty, aka Chat GPT (an AI program), to imitate my style with a new blog post.
One of my own favorite lines I’ve ever written is in my book Champagne for the Soul where I say: “If you don’t know the good news, keep asking and asking until the answer that comes provokes an eruption of joy.”
I hope I live long enough to see the next generation of electric shavers. Indeed I wonder if there has ever been a new generation of this appliance, since the ones today don’t work much better than the one my dad loaned me for my first shave back in the 1960’s.
Life is a great mystery, and we have many questions.
Especially we wonder about evil and suffering.
Why? Why? Why?
Back in the 80’s a favorite worship song of mine—and of just about everyone I knew—was “You Are My Hiding Place” by Michael Ledner.
While writing a book called The Consolation of the Ordinary, I tried to come up with as many synonyms as possible for ordinary: daily, everyday, mundane, quotidian, common, and so on. Only late in this process did it occur to me that one such synonym is small.
If you want to be free, begin by having a God who is free. Let Him be free to do whatever He wants. He’s going to anyway, whether you like it or not, so you might as well give Him your blessing.
I’ll never forget the day I discovered that other people are real. It was 1981, the year I became a Christian, but the event I’m about to describe happened, interestingly, a few months before my conversion.