With my youngest daughter Kate getting married in just a few days, you’d think I’d have precious little time for writing here. And that is so true, which is why I’m mostly passing on some more gleanings from my recent readings. If you ever pray for bloggers you don’t know, add me to the list this week!
1) Leila writes about some of my favorite things in her post Housewifely. I specialize in ironing and wearing an apron, but the other 
things are also high on my list. She writes, “When you put on an apron, you do not merely protect the garments. You also announce your commitment to the task at hand, your willingness to suffer the slings and sputterings of the pots and pans, your resolve to see the work out to the end.”
I wish I had written this post. Sometimes I think I could write a whole book about aprons alone, and how practically and symbolically they are so significant to my own homemaking. I don’t only wear a apron in the kitchen, but to clean house and dig in the garden.
Aprons were one love that I shared with my now-departed friend Bird which is why I made her a new apron at a time when she had no obvious need for one. Bird and I knew that she did in reality use one, as a way to keep herself on the continuum of the woman she had always been.
2) Daphne writes common sense and wisdom about dating and marriage.
“Start dating after you are ready to get married, and date people you can actually see yourself marrying, as doing otherwise is typically a colossal waste of time. ”
“A good marriage is intentional and dating should be too.”
“And none of them live in magical fairy tales; no matter how it’s arranged a relationship always involves confusion, mistakes, and heartache. Crossed wires are built into every human interaction. ”
3) This article on acedia I found to be revealing of all the many ways self-love manifests itself. Fr. Aidan Kimel quotes a 4th-century desert monastic on the eight fundamental passions or thoughts; acedia is central.
“Frustration and aggressiveness combine in a new way and produce this ‘complex’ (that is, interwoven) phenomenon of acedia.”
“’A despondent person hates precisely what is available,’ Evagrius writes, ‘and desires what is not available.'”
4) The last thing I offer you, which was most helpful to me at this time, is Father Stephen writing about Comforting One Another, which is also about comforting ourselves — or rather, not comforting ourselves. You see, we try to comfort ourselves by running away from the heartbreak or pain and suffering, running to pleasures that we think will ease our hurt. They often bring us further pain. We have to make ourselves not run away, but turn to Christ and let Him truly comfort us by His being and presence.
“For it is when our hearts are broken and do not run away or hide that we can call on God to comfort us. And He does….That comfort is the gift of His own life within us, a sharing of His own joy and love.”
me of a book I read when my own children were small, by Andrew Murray, Raising Your Children for Christ. From the blurb on the paperback cover I expected lots of practical advice such as methods of discipline and teaching, but 90% of the book was a month’s worth of devotionals emphasizing the parents’ faith and prayer. Of course, that is very practical – definitely not theoretical! And so is Lisa’s admonition.
found to be invasive, but controllable in my own home garden.
odd and amusing ways. Some are written to forbid urination in various places and the English versions of the warnings can come out saying, “Urination is inhuman,” or “It is forbidden to urinate here. The penalty is bang.”
Gladsome Lights 