"Your body is the first thing any child of man ever wanted. Therefore dispose yourself to be loved, to be wanted, to be available. Be there for them with a vengeance. Be a gracious, bending woman. Incline your ear, your heart, your hands to them.... To be a Mother is to be the sacrament - the effective symbol - of place. Mothers do not make homes, they are our home." from Bed and Board, Robert Farrar Capon

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Today's Quote from "Our Calling"


"[W]e would, I believe, search in vain through Luther's whole preaching about the call for a 
single place wherein he seeks to encourage zeal in one's calling by referring to 
great cultural achievements or the like, which are the results of working in a call. 
On the contrary he always chooses the most humble work as examples, and makes hardly any attempts to reveal links between them and some great common goal to which they are meant to contribute.

The radiance which surrounds them does not come from in front, from their goal, 
but from behind, from their source.

In all striving beyond those tasks which are given directly through the guidance of God, 
[there could be] serious disobedience and beneath that, a relapse into... self-righteousness, 
and beneath that, again, lack of faith, a reliance upon oneself instead of God."

Our Calling, by Einar Billing, page 6

3 comments:

  1. Thank you for this Leah. Sounds like being a homemaker fits right in. I read it to my husband and it reminded him of Os Guiness' story in The Call about his great grandmother watching the man plow his field.

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  2. Wow. I'm missing so many good books.

    May I request a list of books you ladies have read and reccomend?

    Thank you.

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    1. Hi Jenny,
      Right now I'm going back and forth between "Our Calling," by Einar Billing, and "The Theology of the Cross," by Daniel Deutschlander. (Although I'm moving pretty slowly because I'm not as diligent about my reading time as I should be.)

      Both of those books are the types where any page you pick up and read that day is going to be totally relevant to whatever's happening in your life. At least that's how they seem to be for me. :)

      Also Bed and Board, by Robert Farrar Capon, is one of my all time favorite books about marriage, motherhood, and life, written in a very down to earth, poetic, humorous, yet sound perspective.

      Those are the ones I can think of right off the top of my head.

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