Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Homemaker's Prayer



Last night I started reading this book.
 (lent to me by a friend who knew I would love it, and I do!)
I fell in love with it from the first paragraph (pictured below)! 
reflections on the value of home, 
timeless good advice for homemakers,
 prayers, stories and recipes
connected to the stories!


In the first chapter, (written in the '60's) she is contemplating the 
increasing breakdown of homes,  the foundation of strong nations!
Even more relevant now! 



Lord, help me to make home a haven of kindness and grace
For nothing else in all the world can take home-sweet-home’s place
Then fit me with Thy joy and strength, fill every task I do
With thankfulness and love, so above all, I honour You

Lord, help me guard the heart of home with fierce, yet tender care
Lest some ruinous habit leaves it in sad disrepair
Keep me aware of what may harm or wreck its shielding wing
For the heart of the home is like a living, breathing Thing

… And never let the barb of discontentment tear a hole
Into the fabric that ought to protect, cheer and console
Lord, when my home begins to feel like a fragile, chipped cup
Still, let no failure foster the temptation to give up

Lord, teach me with humility to tend with mother’s pride
To details that kindle a glow that reaches far and wide
So that, no matter how far from its happy hearth we roam
The flicker of love’s Candlelight instills a sense of home

…and always draws us gladly back to where we long to be
To nourish us with home-sweet-home’s familiarity
Where welcomes are never worn thin, where love attends life’s woes
In, pray what grants a glimpse of Home beyond time’s curtain-close

© Janet Martin


I love how the beginning of the second chapter
 is in sync with the season I am in;
slowly tucking Christmas away, bit by bit


Books like this kindle in me 
a sweet contentment for the domestic 'mundane'  bliss
For things like 
mending...

ironing...

folding laundry...


tidying clutter...



making cabbage rolls...


(enough to freeze some for convenient suppers-for-one))


Cabbage Rolls...



Psalm 51:10
Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.



Friday, November 24, 2023

Love and Learning's Celebration


Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Today is like an invitation to 
so much joy still left to taste
because joy is unlike most delights we seize 
and devour and then,
 they disappear!



One of my most dearly loved chapters was part of today's bible-in-a-year reading!

Though you have not seen him, you love him; 
and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him 
and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy,...

1 Pet. 1:21
Through him you believe in God, 
who raised him from the dead and glorified him,
 and so your faith and hope are in God.


In this life of love and learning
Rife with delight and dismay
May the Maker of each morning
Kindle gladness for today

May the Harbinger of Heaven
Fill our days with holy worth
For to know we are forgiven
Is the greatest joy on earth

Today unfolds like a flower
Hour-petals fade and fall
Unlike delights we devour
Joy transcends the tangible

Unlike moments softly drifting
Like snowflakes that melt away
God instills dawn’s daily gifting
With joy hinged to Endless Day

We know there is no returning
To estrangement’s yester-place
Today is for love, and learning
Fresh arrangements of God’s grace

Dawn is like an invitation
To what we ought never waste
Love and learning’s celebration
Of so much joy still to taste

© Janet Martin

1 Pet. 1:3-7
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! 
In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope
 through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. 
This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded
 by God’s power until the coming of the salvation 
that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 
6 In all this you greatly rejoice, 
though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 
7 These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—
of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—
may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

I love old books by or about pastors that share wisdom and humor
forged from fellowship and challenges of family and flock!
such as the book I am reading right now...


saying no to a 'money-career' offer, after devastating loss of a hurricane



to a disillusioned doctor who was trying to wash/swim
 his troubles away in the ocean every morning...


to a young girl going down a bad way...




Saturday, October 15, 2022

Already I Am Mourning...


'Oh!' I sighed/moaned, 'When am I going to get time to read all of these beautiful books
full of ever-so-fantastic writing?!'
'You won't' came my daughter Victoria's instant reply.
'That's the sad truth about owning a library! 
You will never read all of the books!'

...But they are still nice to have nearby, like comfortable, wise, old friends.



Already I am mourning all the ways we didn’t meet
I didn’t linger in the leaves you scattered at my feet
I never did discover what you made me think or say
Or needed to recover as your whisper slipped away
The solace that we found in one another’s company
The way you wound yourself around places inside of me
The way you would have kissed me if I’d given you a chance
The way I would have missed you after our parting dance
After the afternoon we didn’t spend, just you and I
With not a thing between us but perhaps a parchment sigh
The friends we could have been, darling, does it not break your heart
The way that we will never meet thus we will never part
A little like a flower bloomed unseen and gone to seed
Already I am mourning all the books I didn’t read

© Janet Martin

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

Book-Shopping


I keep creating a delightful dilemma;
running out of room for books!


Books are becoming the décor of necessity!😀
 



And any neat and tidy bookcases are constantly be messed! 
Isn't that great?!!😊

Is this then 
Ink-toxication? 
I wonder, what else could it be 
The slur of the ditty 
Makes me rather giddy 
Not as sedate as I should be 

Are these yellow pages 
Imbibed with the ages 
Somehow playing tricks on my brain 
This spell I am under 
Is it real, I wonder 
This feeling is hard to explain 

My logic is muddled 
Will-power befuddled 
I don’t feel at all like myself 
I'm hypnotized, I confess  
By ink-induced happiness 
Lining shelf after shelf after shelf 

Those enticing hard covers
Are like starry-eyed lovers
All calling out, pick me, pick me
Oh, tell me, how do
I choose only one or two
Inhale, exhale, I'll take twenty-three

© Janet Martin 









Wednesday, January 29, 2020

So Much To Live For!

I've just returned from a few nights in New England 
where I was treated to a year in Tasha Tudor's gardens
Oh, the bliss of book-travel! 

This trip was such great inspiration to start those seedling-dreams now!
Here's a sneak-peek to a trip you can take too (if you can find the book!)
I had this unexpected pleasure thanks to a friend 
who lent me a book she borrowed from a friend so
unfortunately you will need to find your own 'ticket' to borrow or buy!😀


A trip like this can remind us of so much to live/love for!

So much to live for where moments soft-wed
Wellsprings of waiting with wishes fulfilled
Morning is breaking, mercy is not dead
Rife runs the river that death has not stilled
Where life is granting so much to love for
Four-season circuits of hold and let go
Leaving us torn between graces of yore
Before the faces we kiss with hello

So much to reach for from dawn’s pulsing prow
Where soon high noon then twilight sweeps the lea
Meteor-showers of right here, right now
Sparkle and fizz into echo-debris
Beckoning us to be all that we can
Before the hour of reckoning comes
Where still so much to learn vexes the plan
Caught in the flux of Bygone’s tallied sums

So much to hope for where seasons soft-shed
Petals of farewell for buds primed with plume
Soon we will transplant the dreams in our head
Into the gardens that leap into bloom
So many poems still waiting to be
So many moments to measure and pour
Turning time into opportunity
Where today wakens so much to live for

© Janet Martin

Monday, September 23, 2019

We Are Who/What We Read...


 What/Who are you reading these days?
I was suddenly struck anew by how deeply we are influenced/affected by what we read!
 (or who we listen to, often reading/quoting what someone else wrote)

In Jesus' final prayer before He went to the cross He prayed,
 I have given them Your word and the world has hated them; 
for they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.
I am not asking that You take them out of the world, 
but that You keep them from the evil one. 
 They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.
"Sanctify them by the truth; Your word is truth."
As You sent Me into the world, I have also sent them into the world.
For them I sanctify Myself, so that they too may be sanctified by the truth.
I am not asking on behalf of them alone,
but also on behalf of those who will believe in Me through their message,
that all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. 
May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. 

No matter how many books we collect and read...

 ...if we miss God's book we've missed it all!


They say so much; these teeny twists of ink turned into jot
They arrange on a barren page the images of thought
To touch the reader of the written word with much to tell
And just as ‘we are what we eat’ thus, what we read as well

The Moral Law of right and wrong instills a hounding need
To find, for sake of peace of mind, The Truth; and so we read
But all the greatest authors with The Latest Modern Whim
Can never change The First and Final Word written by Him

Debates of truth and reason fill many a musty tome
The living soul creates a Whole/hole, nay, mammoth astrodome
For Truth is Absolute; and till doubt’s dispute is destroyed
Nothing, no matter what we read or write will fill its void

Ah, wishful thinking seeks colleagues, when nursed to dogged thirst
God’s Truth is not a pillow concerned about comfort first
His Word is undeterred; though wheedling nature of mere men
Will try to barter with His truth through think-twists from a pen

…for the imagination is a wondrous, wily Force
It fosters the creation of many a fine discourse
And if we are not well-versed in the Truth, then, me oh my
We might exchange it for a well-dressed stranger’s valid lie

Hail, to the theologians and scholars; how much you read
The college of the mind is such a large classroom to feed
Yet fathoms of ‘sound knowledge’ cannot rearrange the Truth
And facts are stubborn subjects in spite of progressive youth

If we dismiss The One who holds the keys of death and hell
We miss it all; for God’s Word is a never-ending well
Where, after we believe, then Truth will affirm theory
For nothing else we read exceeds Supreme Author-ity

‘Without faith it is impossible to please Holy God’
Without His Word ignorance feasts on many a feckless fraud
But through His Word the evidence of things we cannot see
Nurtures man’s mustard seed-sized faith to a deep-rooted tree

They say so much; these teeny twists of ink turned into jot
They quicken, with written homage, the aptitude of thought
To fill the theater of Think, with much, so much to tell
And just as ‘we are what we eat’ thus, what we read as well

© Janet Martin

 Matthew 12:3 He answered, “Haven’t you read...?


Wednesday, March 13, 2019

On Learning To Lean


On Friday while I was looking for something to read while the kiddos slept I found this book...

...given to me by a friend for my 50th Birthday,
 then tucked into a must-read pile, then tucked into a bookcase and forgotten...
(or maybe just saved by Someone for a season when its message would be so relevant and fitting) 
Sometimes life re-impacts us with the reality that there are things our love and power
 simply cannot fill or fix
and there are things we simply. cannot. do on our own!



Not in the season of fullness and favour
Not when love’s flavours are sugar intoned
But when the bite of life is sharp and bitter
This keens the hunger where hope’s heart is honed

Not on the hilltop beholding a vista
Stealing our breath with the view all around
But in the climb, in the sweat-blood-tear blister
This bares the crux where trust’s foothold is found

Not in the heaven of sunshine and flower
While we meander without weight of care
But in the brunt of ‘I can’t’s’ darkest hour
This whets the whisper that turns into prayer

Not in the beauty of bounty’s full forces
Not when thought’s field brims with hymns fair and green
But when life drains us of our own resources
This leads us to the Hand that helps us lean

© Janet Martin