Another week of living under the many-splendored mercies of our good and gracious King. Below you’ll find three ways I encountered God’s goodness this week.

First: I found Samuel Ullman’s poem “Youth” deeply engaging and memorable.

Youth is not a time of life—it is a state of mind.  It is not a matter of red cheeks, red lips and supple knees.  It is a temper of the will; a quality of the imagination; a vigor of the emotions;  it is a freshness of the deep springs of life.  Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity,  of the appetite for adventure over a life of ease. This often exists in a man of fifty, more than in a boy of twenty.  Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old by deserting their ideals.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair—these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.

Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being’s heart a love of wonder; the sweet amazement at the stars and starlike things and thoughts; the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what comes next, and the joy in the game of life.

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

In the central place of your heart there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, grandeur, courage, and power from the earth, from men and from the Infinite—so long are you young. When the wires are all down and the central places of your heart are covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then are you grown old, indeed!

Second: Coleman Ford’s insight that Christian maturity isn’t measured by mountaintop experiences resonated with me:

The Christian life is not always a life of exuberant victory and mountaintop experiences. When our sanctification is reduced to such experiences, we are left with a Christian spiritual formation that is dependent upon the movement of a song chorus rather than a movement of the Spirit. . . . If growth is dependent upon spiritual and emotional experiences, then once again the focus remains on us and our ability to conjure up “good vibes” in the midst of smoke and lasers rather than gospel fruit forged in the trials of everyday life (91–92).

Third: I found James Quinn’s “Highland Railway” piano piece truly beautiful.

Thank you for reading, friends. May you have a blessed week ahead.