Tag Archives: C.S. Lewis

Branching out

Posted on by
3

In his preface to The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis writes of life – and its decisions – being like a tree:

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good. (p. viii) Continue reading →

Prolonging the Easter feast

Posted on by
3

Have you packed away Easter already? Put away the bunnies and ducklings and baskets? Taken in the flag from your front garden with the buck-toothed Easter Bunny grinning on it? Swapped out wreaths on the front door? Found the last plastic egg overlooked in the weekend hunt in your back yard?

I have very little in the way of Easter decoration, despite it being my favorite holiday:

My only Easter decorations, painted by my mother

Easter has been my favorite day of the year for most of my life (Christmas ruled in my heart for a while as a child, until I truly understood the meaning and grace and wonder of Easter). After the dreary season of Lent and the heart-wrenching Holy Week services, after the stripping of the sanctuary of color and light and watching everything get draped in black cloth on Maundy Thursday, my heart cries out for the trumpets and the drums and the lilies everywhere and the joyous announcement: “He is risen! He is risen indeed!” Continue reading →

When the devil hijacks your hashtag

Posted on by
Reply

Show of hands: How many of you know what a hashtag is? Need a hint? A little bird told me it looks like this: #

For those of you who don’t use Twitter (I don’t either), a message sent through Twitter is called a tweet.

Basically, tweets are short messages about what’s on your mind. They’re limited to 140 characters, and so you can’t ramble on about a topic. (The last two sentences were exactly 140 characters, to give you an idea of how short that is.)

A hashtag helps you identify keywords in tweets, and hashtags can help you find communities discussing the same topic. For instance, you’ll often see Webcast producers provide a hashtag so viewers can tweet live with each other and submit questions to the speaker during the event. If I were to present a webcast based on my blog, I might create this hashtag for my blog readers to use: #flourishingtree.  Continue reading →

The Hatfields and McCoys in me

Posted on by
2

Now before you start worrying – I’m not confessing to a violent murder (or pig theft) with this week’s title, but I am confessing to a flaw in my character: a stubborn unwillingness to let go of past wrongs. While I come by the stubbornness honestly (I think my folks could easily point out stubborn streaks in the family tree), I’m pretty much alone in my ability to hold a grudge – at least among my closest family members.

My struggle to forgive is not something I’m sure I want to air publicly, but Easter has convicted me to write about it anyway. Easter is that wonderful, joyous holy day of the year when we celebrate Christ’s victory over the grave and the sacrifice he made to save us all.

His death on that wooden cross wiped the slate clean for all of us. His resurrection gives us hope of our own salvation. We are a forgiven people of God.  Continue reading →