Reading My Gifts

While my favorite gift this Christmas was my beautiful engagement ring, I did get some other gifts that I'm enjoying in those moments when I'm not working or staring at previously mentioned sparkling ring. (How long will that ring continue to fascinate me, I wonder?)

Anyway, two of the people that I love the best gave me some of the gifts I love the best: books. And while I haven't gotten entirely through either one just yet, I'm thoroughly enjoying both. And I've already found noteworthy quotes to share, and one day there will be reviews of both.

Katie gave me a novel on my list, The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield. It's one of my favorite plot lines--a book about two writers, one who has been commissioned to write the biography of a famous, prolific, elderly British author. The biographer, Margaret Lea, often reflects on language and reading. Here are two great passages I've discovered so far:

"People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic."

"For me, to see is to read." [I can definitely relate to that one!]

And Henry gave me a beautiful book, also on my book wish list, A Diary of Private Prayer by John Baillie. The book is a collection of prayers for all of the mornings and evenings of the month. This Scottish Calvinist theologian has an understanding of prayer that is instructive, devotional, and edifying all at once. Here's the opening to one for Sunday:

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty: heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory; glory be to Thee, O Lord most high.

"O God, I crave Thy blessing upon this day of rest and refreshment. Let me rejoice today in Thy worship and find gladness in the singing of Thy praises. Forbid, I beseech Thee, that only my body should be refreshed today and not my spirit. Give me grace for such an act of self-recollection as may again bring together the scattered forces of my soul. Enable me to step aside for a little while from the busy life of common days and take thought about its beginning and its end. May Jesus Christ be to-day the companion of my thoughts, so that His divine manhood may more and more take root within my soul. May He be in me and I in Him, even as Thou wert in Him and through Him mayest be in me and I at rest with Thee."