Who is missing from the table? Part 2.

With all our hearts and all our songs join to admire the feast
Each of us cries with thankful tongue, "LORD, why was I a guest?
Why was I made to hear Your voice and enter while there's room,
When thousands make a wretched choice, and rather starve than come?"

'Twas the same love that spread the feast that sweetly drew us in
Else we would still refuse to taste and perish in our sin.

-- Isaac Watts, "How Sweet and Awesome Is the Place," 1707.

If Grace Is an Ocean...

There lives a sea turtle who had lost his sea.

How he reached the desert sands or when, no one knows for certain.  It would almost seem the sprawling arid wasteland were home and always had been. A tortoise I shall be, resolved he. And so he belonged to the wilderness.

I like this picture a lot.

Once upon a time the sea turtle knew his lostness.  Back then he would stop each passerby and ask for the way home. But in these parts no one knew the way.  They had never seen the ocean, was it really real?  The desert, they convinced him, was the only sure place there ever had been or ever would be.

And so the waters drained from his dreams, until he was thirsty but knew it not.