Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Having Fun with Diabetes

My friend and fellow diabetic Chantale (from Quebec) and I were having an email exchange about the joys (not!) of living with diabetes when we got a little silly. Maybe we were high. Or low. Sometimes it's hard to tell, though usually when I'm low I'm far from silly -- I'm just ornery or nasty. Well, by the end of our exchange -- which consisted of trying to think of a positive way to spin our diabetes, we decided to write a book together enumerating ways to have fun with diabetes. So I put together a book jacket that listed some of our ideas. Here it is -- and please let me know of any publishers you think might be interested in it!



Sweetly,
Brent

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Quaker Wisdom for Today

"And I cried in my spirit to the Lord, 'We are all thieves, we are all thieves, we have taken the Scriptures in words and know nothing of them in ourselves.' "

-- Margaret Fell

Friday, April 09, 2010

Quaker Wisdom for Today

"Eternal God, take my life in your hands and lead me through these blind alleys with a heart free from meanness. I will be satisfied to furnish just a little mud for the Great Construction."

-- Pierre Ceresole

Thursday, April 08, 2010

Quaker Wisdom for Today

"There is a time of preaching faith towards God; and there is a time to be brought to God."

-- George Fox

Monday, April 05, 2010

Quaker Wisdom for Today

"'I and the Father are One'. That means to me that I think of God in terms of Jesus Christ, that I pray to Jesus as representing the Father to my consciousness, or to the Father as I see him in Jesus. Carry that thought to Calvary itself. See in the crucifixion not merely a martyr's death, not merely a passing gleam of God's love, certainly not a sacrifice to God carrying a legal significance, but in truth the flashing into light of an eternal fact, the nature of God's relation to sin, of the pain we inflict on his heart by our own wrongdoing. Here is the wonderful dynamic of the cross. God calls you to him. He shows you his suffering, he shows you the hatefulness of the sin that caused it, and, in showing you his love, shows you the punishment of alienation from him, the hell of the unrepentant, in which we must remain until repentance opens the gate for the prodigal and gives entrance to the free forgiveness and love of the Father's house. In Jesus, in his life and his death upon the cross, we are shown the nature of God and the possibilities that are within our reach. We are shown the world as the Father sees it, are called to live in harmony with his will and purpose, to hate the sins that made him mourn, to scale the barrier of sin and discover that the way of penitence lies open and direct to the Fatherly heart. No legal bargain, but a spiritual conflict, an inward change, the rejection of the living death of sin, the choice of the new birth, of the purified self, the conversion from a low and earthly to a high and spiritual standard of life and conduct - here you have the practical conditions of salvation, and in the active, free and holy love of God, ever seeking entrance, ever powerful if we but yield the gateway of our heart, is the substance of the Gospel."

-- John Wilhelm Rowntree

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Quaker Wisdom for Today

"The main difference between ourselves and most other bodies of Christians arises from the emphasis we place o the the Light of God's Holy Spirit in the human soul -- potentially in all human souls, and known in actual experience as these [human souls] are turned towards the Light and are obedient to it. This direct contact between the Spirit of Christ and the human spirit we are prepared to trust as the basis of our individual and corporate life."

-- Christian Life, Faith and Thought in the Society of Friends (1920)