The Long Day Is Over - Norah Jones

 Please play this song at my funeral. 

Birkman Basic Info

You enjoy creative tasks which involve using your imagination. By nature you are likely to be a strategic rather than a tactical thinker, more drawn to ideas and pure research areas than to tangible matters

You are generally thoughtful, insightful particularly with individuals, and a careful decision-maker who prefers to think matters through before committing to action

You respond best to a low-key environment which is structured to some extent but also encourages reflection. You are most comfortable in surroundings which are based on team loyalties rather than individual, competitively-based achievement

Every Good Endeavor _ Tim Keller

 "If we are to be God's image-bearers with regard to creation, then we will carry on his pattern of work. His world is not hostile, so that it needs to be beaten down like an enemy. Rather, its potential is undeveloped, so it needs to be cultivated like a garden. So we are not to relate to the world as park rangers, whose job is not to change their space, but to preserve things as they are. Nor are we to 'pave over the garden' of the created world to make a parking lot. No, we are to be gardeners who take an active stance toward their charge. They do not leave the land as it is. They rearrange it in order to make it most fruitful, to draw the potentialities for growth and development out of the soil. They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind: to rearrange the raw material of the garden so that it produces food, flowers, and beauty. And that is the pattern for all work. It is creative and assertive. It is rearranging the raw material of God's creation in such a way that helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish." 

"Before coming to the United States, I knew what others know: that the cruelty of its borders was only a thin crust, and that on the other side a possible life was waiting," she concludes. "I understood, some time after, that once you stay here long enough, you begin to remember the place where you originally came from the way a backyard might look from a high window in the deep of winter: a skeleton of the world, a tract of abandonment, objects dead and obsolete. And once you're here, you're ready to give everything, or almost everything, to stay and play a part in the great theater of belonging."

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions 

"How much is a little girl worth?"

Rachael Denhollander

i wish we could be friends

your protection of me is love. but it also causes injury. every time i begin to heal, another slew of hurtful words tears open past wounds. vast difference from so much of the same. in the pain i will remember the steps we've taken forward. and i will pray that this wishing will some day become hoping instead. 

“Come, and see the victories of the cross. Christ’s wounds are thy healings, His agonies thy repose, His conflicts thy conquests, His groans thy songs, His pains thine ease, His shame thy glory, His death thy life, His sufferings thy salvation.”

– Matthew Henry