Live for today, but hold your hands open to tomorrow. Anticipate the future and its changes with joy. There is a seed of God’s love in every event, every unpleasant situation in which you may find yourself.
Stop what you are doing long enough to enjoy the sunset, listen to a special song that lifts you up, or pick up the phone and share some special thought with a caring friend.
Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.
We can choose to gather to our hearts the thorns of disappointment, failure, loneliness, and dismay in our present situation. Or we can gather the flowers of God’s grace, boundless love, abiding presence, and unmatched joy. I choose to gather the flowers.
