Election has nothing to do with the eternal salvation of individuals but refers instead to God's way of saving nations. It was a major mistake of the Reformation to have decided to follow Augustine in this matter, taking election to refer to grace and salvation. It manages to make bad news out of good news. It casts a deep shadow over the character of God. At it worst, it can lead to awful consequences in terms of pride, arrogance, superiority, and intolerance as the ideology of election takes hold. It causes the church to become, not a sign of the unity of humanity in the love of God, but the sign of favorites in the midst of the enemies of God.
I do not, can not write just for money. Lord knows I haven't made much. I write because it is what my Father has given me to do. I do not mean that He woke me one morn, put His finger to my forehead and commanded me write. I mean He quietly and gently in His grace, whispered into my head, into my heart: courage to fail, confidence to succeed, belief in my ability to learn and in my own self worth. So in thankfulness I write.
Throughout my life, I have been blessed with a positive and resilient attitude. I grew up with an alcoholic father and he tested my disposition in more ways than you might imagine. Knowing I couldn't depend on him for positive reinforcement, I clung to my positive attitude like a life preserver to give me the strength for positivity and self-reliance. Otherwise, I would have sunk into the depths of low self-esteem and worthlessness. A positive attitude was my saving grace and it became a habit by choice, day-in and day-out.
That is the heavenly Father's deepest impulse toward us. You are the apple of His eye. And anyone who messes with you messes with Him. His protective instincts are most poignantly seen at the cross - the place where unconditional love and omnipotent power for the amalgam called amazing grace. That's where the Creator stepped between every fallen sinner and the fallen angel, Satan. That's where the Advocate took His stand against the Accuser of the brethren. The Sinless Son of God took the fall for us.The cross is God's way of saying, "You are worth dying for.
When sonneteering Wordsworth re-creates the landing of Mary Queen of Scots at the mouth of the Derwent -Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed,The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore- he unveils nothing less than a canvas by Rubens, baroque master of baroque masters; this is the landing of a TRAGIC Marie de Medicis.Yet so receptive was the English ear to sheep-Wordsworth's perverse 'Enough of Art' that it is not any of these works of supreme art, these master-sonnets of English literature, that are sold as picture postcards, with the text in lieu of the view, in the Lake District! it is those eternally, infernally sprightly Daffodils.
Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain - eagle and peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare. The reason for their swiftness is severely practical: food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches of ground may hope to survive. The speed, the whorls and torrents of movement, are in plain fact the mountain's own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is - if the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by strict adherence to the needs of function - so much the more is the mountain's integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.
“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - these qualities you find always in that the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush of the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and in our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death.”
“It wasn't up to us whether we got to perform our talent or not. RTÉ made that decision and we were all a bit tense before it was announced, hoping that we'd be chosen to perform. Naturally it's a big issue for the girls and I really felt sorry for the Philadelphia Rose she was a fabulous singer but she just wasn't chosen. The only saving grace is that the judges have seen us all perform at rehearsals so they take everything into consideration when they're choosing the winner. Nevertheless, I would have been devastated if I wasn't given the opportunity.”
“[Chuck's letters from the USS Mellette are full of him saying,] Brad Allen really got to me about religion. I think we should have prayer in our house. I think we should say grace before meals. Brad Allen tells me if I don't start having a relationship with the Lord, I will just end up another successful executive, president of the Westchester County Golf Club, and then die of a heart attack at age 50. ... I suddenly recognized that Brad Allen did have a big impact on my spiritual development.”