What I'm reading

So, I was supposed to be studying in the last 24 hours, but I've been terribly distracted... Here are some things I've picked up along the way while attempting to study:

Blaise Pascal of mathematical fame was not only into numbers, he was into God too. My summer reading a few years ago was a book of his, and Google's quote of the day is from him,

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction."

My favorite Pascal quote is

"The heart has reasons that Reason knows not of."

Some other Pascal quotes I found today:

Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

A quote from Elisabeth Elliot's book Let Me Be a Woman I read last night:

The special gift and ability of each creature defines its special limitation. And as easily as the bird comes to terms with the necessity of bearing [the weight of its] wings when it finds that it is, in fact, the wings that bear the bird- up, away from the world, into the sky, into freedom- so the woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations her gits, her special calling- wings, in fact, which bear her up into perfect freedom, into the will of God

This week, I was dealing with 'the limitations of womanhood'- the typical female-unexpicable-emotions. I very rarely deal with this, so when it hit this week, it was decidedly frustrating and annoying. Josh gently reminded me, as he always does, that this is the way God made me and God delights in me. Emotion is not a burden, but rather a special gift and 'wings' in this world.

On a completely different note, I was reading an interview with Christian author Philip Yancey in Sojourner's Magazine. He has fascinating insights I appreciate:

I discovered that the world is actually a smiling place, not a scowling place; that God wants me to have a full life, not a half life, not a two-thirds life... I think that's what being spiritual is. It's paying attention—both to epiphanies that other people may overlook, and also to injustices that people may intentionally overlook.