latter thoughts

Our minds it seems often don't let us forget that which we might tuck away. The strangest or simplest thing will trigger the memory of something long ago--and I'm not even that old. Perhaps the most common is that song or album that is for whatever reason completely associated with a certain time or place. There is an album that whenever I listen to it I feel like I am back in Lugano wandering the streets, stopping at a stand for a slice of sicilian-style pizza--or maybe a pastry.

Tonight I was shuffling a deck of cards a certain way. It was the way my brother-in-law always used to shuffle. Some simple, mellow music was drifting over. The room was for the moment a silent group, stilled by the late hour and various others' private thoughts. No one knew what sank in me as the cards dropped, back to front to back. I saw him, sitting, doing the same--shuffling the cards late into the night with nothing else to do, alone in his cell.

On another note, here's a quote by D.A. Carson that I found a little hard to ignore:

"People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to scripture, faith and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated."