“…but where sin increased, grace increased all the more.”

“in the soundless awe and wonder / words fall short to hope again / how beautiful, how vast Your love is / new forever, world without an end.”

“healing hands of God have mercy on our unclean souls once again / Jesus Christ, light of the world, burning bright within our hearts forever / freedom means love with uncondition, without a begining or an end / here’s my heart, let it be forever Yours / only You can make every new day seem so new.”

“It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything else that makes you feel) at the centre of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You’ve got to pick at it and unravel it all until it comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. Maybe Al Green is directly responsible for more than I ever realized.” (>>)

” ‘You’ve only got forty-five seconds left. You’re gonna waste it,’ I remind her. It was cute – she took her wishes so seriously, like missing out on any opportunity to get something for nothing was enough reason to be brought up on charges. It was her way of clipping coupons, I guess.” (>>)

Free money! Yay! Thanks to everyone who prayed.

“We demand the extraordinary, when God has given us the beautiful ordinary. Or, maybe it’s not that ordinary. Maybe we’re just too used to it.” (>>)

“For the children of the working poor, getting an education has become not so much a test of intelligence as one of endurance.” (>>)

“The case file you’re about to read has been compiled from my memory and the case notes of another securitymonkey-type that worked with me. Like all the case files on this site, the events actually happened – but the details have been heavily modified to protect the identities of those involved. (And to protect my monkey butt.)” (>>)

“Being foreigners ourselves, we Americans know what foreigners are up to with their foreign policy—their ven­omous convents, lying alliances, greedy agreements, and trick-or-treaties. America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don’t think that way. We don’t think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you’ve got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags. A fundamental American question is ‘What’s the big idea?’ ” (>>)

“It’s like a really good science fiction movie by Robert Rodriguez with kung fu, gunfights, cynical-yet-romantic bounty hunters, seedy Tijuana bars, a soundtrack jammed with jazz and blues, and it’s in Japanese. And animated really well.” (>>)

“What is truth? Can you recognize it when you hear it?”
“Yes, I can.”
“But how do you recognize it? Can you teach me how?”
“If you will not hear the truth, no one can tell you.” (>>)

Pinkerton.

“Know what the real test is? Not that we’ve now committed a handful of atrocities of our own. Such things occur in every war. It’s in our reaction to them.” (>>)

“I’ll have to find a job and somewhere to live and eek out a living. I’ll have to start paying real bills with real money that I’ve somehow worked to earn. I’ll have to learn what it’s really like to punch a timecard and struggle to pay for all the ‘neccessities’ of life like food and telephone bills and electricity and toilet paper and seven years of post secondary education…” (>>)

“Generally, I would say, most Christians operate according to the same principles as non-Christians when it comes to pop-culture. Let me explain. For the most part, Christians idolize pop icons in the same way that non-Christians do. Maybe we would like to say we don’t, but I believe we do. We elevate Christian pastors, musicians, worship leaders and authors all the time. We place these individuals in places that they do not belong. It’s no different than in the secular industry and sometimes its worse because these people are popular ‘for God.’ That’s a dangerous phrase: Pop icons for God.” (>>)

“Remember the salad days of late 1998 and the entire year of 1999?” (>>)

Cute Little Mouse Crushed to Death by Petting

“They struck up a conversation. The readiness of the fair young man in the Swiss cloak to answer all his swarthy companion’s inquiries was astonishing and without the merest suspicion of the absolute thoughtlessness, inappropriateness and idleness of some of the questions.” (>>)

I’ve got an interview w/ GDITA on the 24th for a scholarship, if anyone feels like praying.

“It’s funny, when your faith finally caves, it goes all at once. You realize you were just a shell held together with hackneyed rituals and desperate hopes. You are not strong. You do not have answers.” (>>)

If you’re using any content aggregators to keep up with this blog, here‘s the new XML feed.

Such Great Heights by The Postal Service is a great song.

Kudos to Lycos’s MP3 Search for being an MP3 search engine that actually works.

This is why I haven’t blogged for a week.

“Maybe all jobs are like this in the sense that there are the good parts and the bad parts, the bad parts occupying the majority of the space because it is a JOB after all. If you have a job where there are more good parts than bad parts then you’ve obviously made a deal with the devil and you’re going to spend the rest of eternity being tortured by fork-wielding elves to make up for the imbalance. I’m just saying.” (>>)

“You just did it again,” Carol said.
“What?”
“You sighed. You never used to sigh. In seventeen years of marriage, I never heard you sigh until these last few months.”
“Yeah.” We kept staring at that spot on the kitchen floor, not talking. Carol reached her arm around my waist and gave me a gentle squeeze. I said, “I keep thinking that there must be this ranch out in New Mexico somewhere. You know, we move out there, I get a horse …”
“And you ride the range all day and never have to talk to anybody. Cowboy Dan.”
“Yeah. The thought of the quiet and the dry air and the big sky—shoot, I’ve never even been to New Mexico, but I’m ready to move tomorrow…” (>>)

“In my story, I am born of a man named Integrity and a woman named Desire. They fled the humid and dangerous lands of their birth, leaving behind the red earth and tall pines to seek their fortune in a border town, nestled in a lonely pass on the far eastern edge of Mountain Time.” (>>)