Out of chaos

To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power.  -- George MacDonald

That is from Leaves of Gold, a book of quotations, one of those books from years back that was intended to be edifying Sabbath reading.

I picked it up from our church library's downsizing, mostly for its embossed cover. It was clear that it had not been read much.

I did try reading it, and found that it was thoroughly unreadable...the quotations are sorted by topic, and to lurch from one author's thought on a topic to another author's entirely different thought on the same topic is extremely unpleasant.

So I consigned it to the collage pile that I keep for my weekly art journaling.

One of the things I have been thinking about recently is how we shape our world by what we choose and what we reject. I keep being amazed by how, in my art journaling, I sort through some random printed material, cutting out a thing here and a thing there, and then paste them together along with a few words and some drawing or painting, and usually it all comes together quite coherently.

I've found it helpful to go back to some of my journaling pages a few months later, and write a "moral" for each one on the back...it's kind of a higher order of finding meaning in them.

If I were mendacious, I would come up with a fortune-telling scheme "based on the science of quantum entanglement", and how many apparently unrelated things are actually connected.

Anyway, in my last art journaling session, I opened the book at random, and found the George MacDonald quotation. It fits in with some other things I have been thinking about. I also found a picture from a grocery store magazine that tied several completely different ideas that I've been thinking about together very neatly.

In the same way, my daily Bible reading is usually at random, and I look for verses that speak to me. It's not a method that works for Christian fortune-telling, but it does at least reveal some of what is going on in me, and often seems to reveal (through the Holy Spirit) things God is saying here and now to me.