What Wondrous Love is This?

I was singing this earlier today from the Cantus Christi, along with some others. It is so beautiful and keeps coming back to mind.

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,To bear the dreadful curse for my soul.

When I was sinking down, sinking down, sinking down,
When I was sinking down, sinking down,
When I was sinking down beneath God’s righteous frown,
Christ laid aside His crown for my soul, for my soul,
Christ laid aside His crown for my soul.

To God and to the Lamb, I will sing, I will sing;
To God and to the Lamb, I will sing.
To God and to the Lamb Who is the great “I Am”;
While millions join the theme, I will sing, I will sing;
While millions join the theme, I will sing.

And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on;
And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on.
And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing and joyful be;
And through eternity, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on;
And through eternity, I’ll sing on.

Words from the CyberHymnal, so I didn't have to type it all in, but it's also in the Cantus Christi.

Blogging in the News

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Web logs, or blogs, may be a powerful new force in U.S. politics but they have not displaced traditional media in terms of information and influence, a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project revealed on Monday.

...

Read the rest here.

Chai tea. Journal. Pen. Sunset. = Perfect. 

This has been one of my more interesting weeks, technologically speaking.
So far, my wi-fi card died (well, either it died, or the port died) and so I now have a spiffy USB wi-fi...thingee, thanks to my dad. Then, I've been getting this blue screen that pops up when I'm online, but when you randomly push a key, it goes away.

Odd. But today's event really was the scariest. I think my laptop is enjoying this way too much. Somehow, my hard drive wiggled loose a bit, and so my computer gave me all these messages about not having a boot disk, and Drive C having disappeared.

I was on the verge of believing my computer had died and lost all my writing (this would only be the third time or so that it's tried to play around with me and make me think that!) when I noticed that there was an odd projection on the left side of the laptop. Voila!

Problems solved... for now.

My favorite Van Gogh, I think. :-) 

"...food is not medicine. Yes, someone might answer, but the food is being administered to her. She cannot feed herself. Exactly, and note where this logic takes you. Babies cannot feed themselves either. There is nothing here that cannot serve equally well as an argument for starving an unacceptable infant. And if what constitutes "acceptable" or "unacceptable" is to be waved off as an "intensely private issue," just know that you have opened the door to starving people because they have Downs, a club foot, or simply because she is a daughter and not a son."
~ Douglas Wilson, here

Wind blows my hair into my eyes. A canyon swerves and slithers below me, and I hold tightly to my seven year old brother’s hand. For once he doesn’t mind, looking down from the rocky, craggy overlook down, down, down at the river far below.
A bumpy dirt road makes our Suburban tilt and jolt and jiggle us, to the pure delight of all five brothers. One gives me an ecstatic thumbs up as we jounce over a particularly large rock. Then we give the rest of the road a miss, and turn around and go back, this time climbing up the hill.
We laugh on the way back as we remember what we read on the funny sign, the one that we rolled by on the way in. The boys disbelieved the picture, they didn’t think it was possible for a road to be open and still have the warnings it did. I hoped all the pilots were still lingering over their Sunday dinners, not testing equipment.
The road back winds through cattle country, through hilly land that is dotted with irrigation equipment in the valleys and cattle on the hills. Barbed wire borders the road, and a house stands in the middle of three fields and a narrow, sloping hill, black cattle feeding spread out over it. The house is two story, painted white, surrounded by trees, protecting from the playful wind, which wants to loosen shingles and slip dust through cracks when you aren’t looking. We are well past the house by the time I finish telling about it.
Now the lands are gently, gently rolling. We pass twenty ravens, cooly stalking through the grass, socializing on a sunny afternoon. Stacks of hay bales stand near another house. Far away mountains look purple blue in the distance, like huge piles of blueberries, the snow being a liberal amount of whipped cream. Farm equipment I can’t identify draws my attention closer. Tall trees that I likewise am puzzled to name reach for the sky, each branch reaching up, instead of branching out as I expect trees to. A field that was hay, and has already been harvested, gleams in the sun like gold confetti. A red barn is seen and then just as suddenly disappears around the bend.
Now there are mountains ahead of us as well as on the side, and we can see a lake, as blue as the mountains in the distance, but bordered by tan and green fields. The essence of cow assaults my nose, reminding me of laundry, the wet rags sharing and compounding
their odor with everything else.
But, as I write this, at any rate, it is almost time for lunch, so I’ll give up odorous comparisons and contemplate such joys as sandwiches and spinach dip, of which the green hills, the color light and creamy, remind me.
I try to think of some way to compare trees with sandwiches, but it eludes them. Although they do remind me of salads I’ve had, swirling vegetables that I classify as "greens". Although sometimes they’re purple-ish red. But never taller than I am, although I am on the short side! ;-)

My laptop power cord has died... so my infrequent posts are about to become much less frequent for the next two weeks or so!

My dentist's office has wi-fi... wow.

Right now I'm toying with the idea of trying to be published, or to sell my work.

If anyone knows of a writer's magazine, either an e-zine or other, that takes contributions, whether it pays or not, I'd be interested. I'm writing short stories, poems, and some short nonfiction.

I love photo editing... :-) 

R.C. Sproul's recent post reminded me of how surprised I was myself when I found that in Germany, the unemployed on benefits are required to take whatever employment is available.

A second cousin of mine, a woman, middle aged, was unemployed when I was over there this past summer, and talking to her it emerged that she was told she had to work at an esc0rt service, since it was what was available.
Whatever is available, she has to do— whether backbreaking labor, ill suited to her age, or humiliating work, such as esc0rt services or worse. She was obviously unhappy with the situation, the product of a socialist government.
(I'm not in direct contact with my German relatives, so I don't know whether she found another position. I would imagine so, since I think my Oma would have mentioned it otherwise.)

I wonder now... will our own government take the example given by Germany? If you're paying unemployed people, it seems only fair that they be required to actually work, not just make a token “effort” to find work.

I think the root problem is not only that the government pays you to be unemployed, but that you took the money. He who pays the piper picks the tune, right? Government money comes with strings attached.

R.C. points out that the "real problem isn’t legalized prostitution, the selling of bodies, but the welfare state, and the selling of souls."

Hmm.