Blogging Trails

I started out at Transforming Sermons. I often do start out there, sometimes using Milton's blogroll as resource page whenever I want to scrounge about on the Christian side of the blogosphere. So I clicked on A Disciple's Journey. That's James MacMahon's blog, by the way. I went to Jim's Blogs I Read page, and clicked on Jesus Manifesto. That's the blog of Mark Van Steenwyk. He's a young Christian radical, ala Shane Claiborne. And he has an interesting page of recommended readings, called Reading for the Resistance (note the 60s counterculture lingo). A very interesting list here. I'm probably going to have a closer look at some of these titles.

Anyway, backtracking to Jim's blogroll, I click on Word from the Desert. Many quotations from the desert fathers, as you might expect. Like this one from St. John Climacus:

Never search about for the words to show people you love them. Instead, ask God to show them your love without your having to talk about it. Otherwise you will never have time enough both for loving gestures and for compunction.

Backtracking again to A Disciple's Journey, I click on It Takes a Church. Tod Bolsinger is an old blogging companion, but one I haven't visited lately. And it is very good to make his acquaintance once again. Tod had this to say about learning new things (i.e. a new language, or how to play an instrument, etc.):

First it´s hard.
Then it´s easy.
Then it´s really hard.
Then..it just is.

He calls this the rhythm of learning. I like that. I usually get stuck at "First it's really hard" and give up all hope. But it helps me to be reminded of this rhythm. Me, I'm struggling to learn a couple of new things just now (how to play the ukulele, how to write a novel). Boy, I can't wait till "it just is."