The Tangle

I've had a tangle of thoughts in my head for a while now. They are so tightly interwoven, its difficult for me to follow one coherent string to its end. But they all share the same basic color -- that of simplifying, learning to be still, focusing on eternal priorities, nurturing a thankful heart, living a disciplined life, being purposeful.

My post over at 5 Minutes for Parenting today touches on one shade of that theme. So head over there and let me know if it resonates with you. (Or if my thoughts are so muddled they doesn't make sense to anyone outside of my mind.)

Bonus for you, since you're here -- a profound quote that is having a huge impact on me this year in regard to the tangle.

By examining as closely and candidly as I could the life that had come to seem to me in many ways a kind of trap or dead-end street, I discovered that it really wasn't that at all. I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day's work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly. In writing those lectures and the book they later turned into, it came to seem to me that if I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
- Frederick Buechner, "Now and Then"