Link Love: Some beauty for your weekend wanderings

My process of creating a Link Love post is to generally keep sixty-five tabs open on my browser of things I want to read or have read and wanted to share, and when I finally get so tired of them all being open, to finally compose a post. Today is that day.

I have had this one from Michelle DeRusha opened since it published and read it innumerable times. It guts me. It guts me because I have not been able to arrive at the ground beneath my feet in the part of the country in which I live. I swing from paralyzing guilt because I must be like the Israelites whining for Egypt to confidence that God put humans in a garden surrounded by bounty, he made us to love beauty and to hunt for it and my desire for it is good, given by Him. Michelle writes introspectively and vulnerably.

One of my favorite novels is Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. I will always remember the pulsing of my heart reading the last 100 or so pages. It is a stunning work of art and I want everyone I know to read it. Here’s Leif speaking at Rabbit Room relaxing into mystery and letting it drive our work. It’s a message I need often.

I shared this on my last Link Love, but I’ve kept it open, rereading it again a few times since. Maybe you need to reread it again too.

A friend shared Godspeed with me when it first released and another friend reminded me of it a few months ago. I finally took the time to watch it (it’s not long, I don’t know why I hadn’t) and I’m glad I did. It’s just the story of Matt Canlis’s time in a Scotland Parish, caring for the people within it and learning a different speed of life. Perhaps it will encourage you like it did me.

The Rabbit Room is just always producing beautiful, thought-provoking work, and this piece is no less. If you have struggled with the idea of God as Father because of the failures of your earthly father, I hope it encourages you.

Finally, this piece in Christianity Today about infertility from a husband’s perspective was worth sharing. He tips some sacred cows and common misconceptions from the male point of view that Nate and I have both struggled with in our childless journey. Even if this isn’t you, I hope you’ll take the time to read this article and grow in empathy for some silent sufferers among us.

. . .

I rarely ask for prayer on this page but I recognize that our relationship with one another becomes very one-sided if I never become vulnerable enough to ask something of you as well.

Tonight our home goes on the market and because of the last time we sold a house, I am feeling some anxiety and fear. I keep reminding myself this is not the same situation and God has been so at work in us and such a giver of peace through this process. But the fear rises again and again. One thing God is teaching me is to ask for what I want, which is something I am awfully bad at doing. I have felt disappointed too many times in life, particularly in the failure of the Big Things I’ve asked for to happen at all, or happen on the timeline in which I wanted them. Theologically I know God withholds no good thing from those he loves and if I haven’t got the thing I want, it is because I am either not asking for a good thing or because God knows it is not the right time for a good thing. But knowing this theologically doesn’t resolve the sadness or grief when disappointment comes again.

I am learning, perhaps for the first time in my life, that it does no good to pretend to be not disappointed or unafraid in the face of a possible disappointment. But I am a master pretender and the way forward seems hard and foggy. I am asking some big things of the Lord in this move and He doesn’t have to do a single one of them, not really, but the exercise of faith means to ask and not to simply pretend I’m above asking, because that’s pride. So, will you ask with me? Thank you, truly.

This is from the cover art of the companion book to Godspeed and I couldn’t find its original artist. Perhaps one of you know and could let me know.