It Doesn’t Have To Be Easy

“It is the glory of God to conceal a thing but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.” Proverbs 25:2

In Latin, “gloria Dei celare verbum et gloria regum investigare sermonem.”

I was talking with a generation the other day who was expressing how important it was to just stick to those things that come easily to you, naturally and without some horrid exerted effort to acquire some skill or knowledge. The sense I had in our conversation was that growth should be natural and spontaneous, not planned or built on traditions that had gone before.

I thought to myself, “Hmmm. That would render the vast advances in fields that people had a natural passion for, yet had to acquire a skill, knowledge and experience base in order to reach beyond the highest advances in their arena of passion, unneccessary or even undesirable.”

So I said to the generation I was speaking to, “No, I think that to open oneself to the accumulated knowledge of others before us is vital, even if in the end (or the beginning) we give it our own innovative twist.

If applying our energies is, in the end, the very goal we may be after, then this could provide for us a way of living that is always growing, and always being guided by what has gone before. Natural growth is good, but must often be pruned to optimize growth in a certain direction.”

I was just thinking.

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Sheltering Mercy: Prayers Inspired by the Psalms

Sheltering Mercy, along with its companion volume, Endless Grace, helps us rediscover the rich treasures of the Psalms—through free-verse prayer renderings of their poems and hymns—as a guide to personal devotion and meditation.

The church has always used the Psalms as part of its prayer life, and they have inspired countless other prayers. This book contains 75 prayers drawn from Psalms 1-75, providing lyrical sketches of what authors Ryan Smith and Dan Wilt have seen, heard, and felt while sojourning in the Psalms. Each prayer is a response to the Psalms written in harmony with Scripture. These prayers help us quiet our hearts before God and welcome us into a safe place amid the storms of life.

This artful, poetic, and classic devotional book features compelling custom illustrations and foil-stamped hardcover binding, offering a fresh way to reflect on and pray the Psalms.