Thought for the morning

From yesterday's Magnificat meditation:

"Faith is not a thing of the mind; it is not an intellectual certainty or a felt conviction of the heart. It is a sustained decision to take God with utter seriousness as the God of my life... Often it may seem as if we only act "as if," so unaffected are our hearts, perhaps even mocking us: "Where is your God!" It is this acting out "as if" that is true faith. All that matters to faith is that God should have what He wants and we know that what He wants is always our own blessedness."

Quote Journal

I have been keeping a quote journal since 2006, when I read that many of the great thinkers in the past several hundred years did so -- not that I think I'm a great thinker, of course, but I realized that this was a fantastic idea. Too often I find myself trying to remember some quote from "some book I read... written by someone...", which is completely useless.

With the possibility of googling just about any quote I'm trying to remember, a quote journal may seem silly.

But it's not.

I find myself going back through it, and being inspired again by thoughts and passages that I wrote down years ago.

So, in the spirit of Julie from Happy Catholic (who has kept a quote journal for many years and does a much better job of it than I do!), I offer my first installment from my journal -- a quote I came back to over and over again when my father-in-law was battling brain cancer:

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"Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity. My father was in a fight with this tumor, and none of us understood the battle. We thought he was done for, but it was making him great."

--Thomas Merton, The Seven-Storey Mountain

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Overheard

"OK, guys, new rule:

Goldfish are illegal artillery."

Quote for the Day

...from one of my favorite homekeeping books of all time: Mrs. Dunwoody's Excellent Instructions for Homekeeping...

A Little Common Sense
Our family members will carry
the atmosphere we create in our homes
for the rest of their lives.