You are my King
come take Your throne
You're all I need
Lord You alone
there is no way i can make it without You
Lord use my life as it pleases You

as it pleases You
as it pleases You
all I have
You have given
all I need
You will supply
there is no way i can make it without You
Lord use my life as it pleases You

The light of the dawn is upon you!

rise up, o you sleeper, awake!

come, broken and weary.
come, battered and bruised.

my Jesus makes all things new, all things new!

come, lost and abandoned.
come, blown by the wind.

he'll bring you back home again, home again!

come, frozen with shame.
come, burdened with guilt.

my Jesus, he loves you still, he loves you still!

// "all things new," andrew peterson.

come, see a man who told me all that i ever did. can this be the Christ? // john 4.29

good news! good news!
the burning light that exposes us
has become for us the light of a new day!

the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. // john 1.5

Seeing Saturn.

Should i bike? Or subway? I already did bikram today and have some reading to do... I thought as I maneuvered my bike back up the stairs to my apartment. 1 train? or ACBD? I got on the red. 29 minutes tonight, to Ava's house. Grateful for Ava and Carolyn who've welcomed me into their lovely life-giving friendship. Carolyn is 28, a single VP at Goldman, sweet and unsoured by all the things she could be stressed over. Ava taught in South Bronx public schools before she had Grace, Peace, and Lovingkindness, in Greek, Greek, and Hebrew, who are 7, 4, and 2. She fed me leftover fish, the kids had found it too spicy. You'd think 2.5 hours is more than enough but it sure went by quickly with 30 set aside to pray with and for one another. Stopped by Fairway after Ava's for finals season brain food. These raspberry yogurt pretzels are great! Perfectly sweet n salty. At 77th and Central Park West a group of kind self proclaimed "random weirdos" invited me to peek into their telescope. I looked into the wrong hole on the first try. "Wanna see Saturn?" one guy asked and his buddy said its a good pickup line. "I sure do.... More than i want to see Uranus." One of the guys was wearing a "get real!" "be rational!" tee. He had David Crowder, or maybe Albert Schweitzer hair. The girl hanging off his arm looked like she'd walked straight out of a Free People catalog. Rad. While I waited for the uptown local train home, an A, D, A, D, D, A zipped by, as did 46 minutes, on the express track, to the chorus of misleading automated announcements prophesying an uptown local train 2 stations away. An MTA worker whistled while she swept litter into the tracks, and said there were no uptown local trains tonight. So I had to take the A-train to 59th and go from there. I was glad to get a little reading done, thank you kindle app, as I tapped my foot and groaned at passing trains. And I saw Saturn's rings for the first time this beautiful night. Onto those papers and field notes. A night in the life.

If you kept your eyes open, you'd pray.

The human condition teeters on the edge of disaster. Human beings are in trouble most of the time. Those who don't know they are in trouble are in the worst trouble. Prayer is the language of people who are in trouble and know it, and who believe or hope that God can get them out. 

As prayer is practiced, it moves into other levels and develops other forms, but trouble--being in the wrong, being in danger, realizing that the foes are too many for us to handle--is the basic provocation for prayer. Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, "I only prayer when I am in trouble. But I am in trouble all the time, and so I pray all the time." The recipe for obeying St. Paul's "pray without ceasing" is not a strict ascetical regimen but a watchful recognition of the trouble we are in.

// Eugene Peterson

Ingrown Eyes

Took the hour to catch up and pray through current world events.

Since Japan quaked I have not cared to take in the world more than 140 characters at a time. It's scary and saddening to care and to know the things that change and the things that stay the same. It's scary to travel all around the world news and suddenly realize the whole world cannot outsize my innate claustrophobia. It's scary to admit that some of the scariness and insecurity is mercy over the megaphone of One God who warns that securities and futures are not ultimately to be laid up or found in all this world.

Heart, do not turn a blind eye to his loving warnings. Or do the ostrich thing and ignore all that is happening, or pretend/seek to be impervious to the world's breaking. For yet once more, He will shake the heavens and the earth. See, believe, proclaim.

I've never had a TV or used the radio since moving to NYC. And a year ago, I quit my International Studies major. Then my The Economist and FP subscriptions ran out this past winter. And the Times online was no longer no dolla when this spring came around. Then I became too entangled in a messy collision of past and present to let any other events but mine really occupy my shrinking heart.

Spiraling inward, consumed by the drama, harassed by sin, sickened by self, feeling sorry all around... Seeing my sickening vapid narcissism, I was slipping downward still, though plenty warned by another's. You'd think the more you introspect the more clearly you appear to yourself as you are.

But ingrown eyes can only see in distortions.

God the holy, inescapable Other so loved the world, He entered it.

And inviting the worldly to love Him back, He also gave us each other.

So that we could see clearly, and live.