Death at 22.

A beautiful summer day doesn't quite seem fitting for a post about a young woman dying, but it is what it is. I heard of Marina Keegan's story from a friend's tumblr and can't help but share. The article from which Beca draws her quote is titled, "How to Feel When an Impossibly Promising 22-Year-Old Passes Away."  Yeesh.

I have also linked to that article—and I encourage you to read it if it isn't old news to you already—but what I took away from it actually came from an op-ed written by the 22-year-old herself, just days before her premature passing:

"Of course, there are things we wished we did: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my High School self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us."

This is, naturally, something that a recent college grad could immediately relate to, and I did. What left me with a dropped jaw was a statement she makes a few paragraphs later:

new reading list.

I got a Kindle for Christmas, and this is the current stash of free books floating around on it:

• Oliver Twist
• Frankenstein
• Uncle Tom's Cabin
• The Invisible Man
• The Old Man and the Sea
• The Secret Garden
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• David Copperfield
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Freakonomics
• Great Expectations

WHICH SHOULD I TACKLE FIRST??

(comment here, or tweet me your choice!)

the future.

This, Z and I decided, is what we absolutely, positively do not want our future lives to be like:

"We get caught in a hectic maze. Rising when the clock determines. Battered 

by news headlines that seem remote and beyond our reach. Jangled by all the 

mechanical operations that launch us into activity and productivity. Tested by 

traffic, forced to calculate time and distance to the second. Elevators and phones 

and gadgets guide us through necessary interactions and keep human interactions 

superficial and at a minimum. Our concentration is interspersed by meetings and 

small crises. At the end of the day we rewind ourselves: traffic, automation, 

headlines, until we set that alarm clock to dictate tomorrow's awakening. Routines of 

ticking and timing. Little room for responding humanly and humanely to the day's events; 

little time to enter into the wisdom and freshness and the promise of its opportunities. 

We feel our lives closing in, confining and conforming us."

(from Spirituality of Compassion, by Joan Puls)

I apologize for the relatively long passage, but when I started typing it out and trying to find a place to cut it off, I just ended up wanting to add more and more on. Isn't it an incredible depiction of so many people's lives out there?

There aren't any plans yet on how to achieve this, but it seems like just keeping that goal in mind is an important step, right? We'll see. Anyone have any tips and tricks to offer?

-M

A paradoxical life.

   "When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.
     To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God's grace means."

-Brennan Manning in The Ragamuffin Gospel

As I make my way through this list of books, I hope you don't mind if I pick some passages here and there to post. I'll try to limit them to one a day, but I won't make any promises : )
-M

my reading list

So what's on my agenda, you ask? Reading, mostly. And learning Italian [fingers crossed].
Here's a visual list of books currently awaiting my eager eyes, in no particular order. Some are re-reads, most are first-timers, all are keenly anticipated.

The Pursuit of God

One of my goals for over the next couple of months is to read. A lot. I plan to post the tentative reading list soon, but until then, I want to share a prayer that is in the early pages of the first book I'm tackling: The Pursuit of God, by A. W. Tozer. I bought this book a few years ago, and spotted it at the back of my bookshelf when I was packing things up last week. I decided it was time for a re-read.

Below is one of Tozer's prayers that I really loved, from the end of a chapter titled, "Following Hard after God." I found the prayer to be an amazing reminder that, as a Christian, I ought to be constantly striving for a deeper relationship with God. Here it is (with emphasis added)--

O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me 

and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of 
my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. 
O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long 
to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty 
still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may 

know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love 
within me. Say to my soul, "Rise up, my love, my fair one, 
and come away." Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee 
up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.

Maybe that prayer touched you, too, and maybe it didn't. In any case, happy last-day-of-January! I'll try to post that reading list soon!

~M