Memorial Day Pics and a Eugene Peterson Quote

I had a very memorable and beautiful Memorial Day, including my second annual drive through the Beartooth Pass. Well, an attempted drive, given that most of the highway turned out to be closed due to the inordinate amount of snow and rain that we've gotten in the last week. But the snow/rain actually made the drive even more unique and beautiful.

Life in Montana is never dull.

Callie-bug never passes up a chance to curl up under a coat or a blanket.

I spend my lunch hour every-other week reading Eugene Peterson's book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction with a friend, and here are two quotes from today's chapter.

"All the same, we do become anxious, we do slip into fearful moods, we become uncertain and insecure. The confident, robust faith that we desire and think is our destiny is qualified by recurrent insecurities. Singing Psalm 125 is one way Christians have to develop confidence and banish insecurity. The psalm makes its mark not by naively whistling when life is dark but by honestly facing the typical insecurities that beset us and putting them in their place." (86)

and

" 'The fist of the wicked / will never violate / What is due the righteous, / provoking wrongful violence.' The key word is violate: cancel God's purposes that are being worked out ... If the evil fist is permanent, if there is no hope for salvation, even the most faithful and devout person will break and respond in 'wrongful violence.' But
God does not permit that to happen. Danger and oppression are never too much for faith. They were not too much for Job, they were not too much for Jeremiah, and they were not too much for Jesus. Evil is always temporary. 'The worst does not last.' Nothing counter to God's justice has any eternity to it." (88-89, underlines mine)