Fall is beginning to chill the air, and bring a cheery red to leaves & berries.
Winds that nip at your face & hands have started to softly blow.
People are wearing their scarves & coats, football sweatshirts, & hats.
I have started drinking larger amounts of tea, and our hot-beverage drawer is losing stock at a busy pace.
Fall. Don't you love it?
Well, I'm extreme
ly excited-- Katie and I are going to a retreat tomorrow! :) Eric & Leslie Ludy, two of our favorite authors, offer a "Set Apart Girl Weekend", where we get to fellowship with other like-minded girls, spend time in the Word of God, hear great teaching, be encouraged, & encourage one another! I've been looking forward to this time so much, & am very thankful that Leslie Ludy & her family are willing to open their home to young women they haven't even met before! What a great example of godly hospitality & servanthood.
We'll be flying out tomorrow, so please pray that we would have a safe flight, & be a blessing in Colorado!
The Ludy's hospitality reminds me of another Christian couple I read about this spring. Both of their stories have inspired me to have a Christ-centered marriage that will not weaken, but grow stronger & sweeter with time. They have also encouraged me to live a life wholly dedicated to the Lord, no matter the consequences.
This other couple is Sheldon & Jean Vanauken. Sheldon Vanauken wrote A Severe Mercy, a biography & story of their lives together. It is one of the best books I have ever read! I would encourage you to read it!
Here is an excerpt that I was thinking about today. Sheldon & Jean are attending Oxford university together. They are brand-new Christians & close friends with CS Lewis. Their home, known as "The Studio", was a center of Christian hospitality. Here is Sheldon's account of it:
"Because the Studio was central and, incidentally, on the way from North Oxford to St. Ebbe's, and because, perhaps, of its extraordinary atmosphere, compounded of the gas-lit cobbled lane outside and the warm upper room, with its skylight black with rain and its cheerful fire (except when the wind was wrong, of course), it became the centre of a lively life in Christ for a great many people.
"We soon accepted that if we hoped to get any work done we must do it in the Bodleian Library; and even then we often came home to find that friends had arrived and were already deep into some absorbing discussion.
"The diary indicates that in one week, taken at random, twenty-four people came, six of them twice, so there were thirty times that the brass knocker sounded and one of us leaped down the narrow stairway. For nearly two years, except when we went up to London to see plays or went visiting or travelling, there was hardly a day or night that people did not come, both Christians and non-Christians (those who said they weren't); and there were literally hundreds of absorbing conversations... all our friends and acquaintances, Christian or otherwise, came by, sometimes bringing others-- sometimes only for a few minutes, sometimes for hours.
"There were conversations upon almost every imaginable subject, yet sooner or later, it seemed, that talk would drift round to ultimate things and Christianity. Never was there such talk as there was at St. Udio's, as we sometimes called it, talk gay and serious by turns, or both at once. No one who was a part of that scene has ever quite forgotten it.
"And as a background, accepted, hardly noticed, yet a part of the texture of the hours, there were the bells of Oxford, ringing across the night. Hardly less part of it was the rain on the skylight. And, as in Julian's poem, the goodbyes: going down the narrow staircase and out into Pusey Lane to speed the departing friend with 'Goodbye, goodnight. Go under the Mercy.' The phrase comes from Charles Williams, and we all used it-- indeed, still use it, some of us, after the years.
"There w
ould be a
halo round the gas lamp in the lane, and the
slight English rain like a mist, and the cobblestones of the lane would be
glistening. 'Goodnight. Go under the Mercy.' And the friend would say perhaps:
'Sleep under the Protection. Goodnight.' And then the sound of heels
marching away into the
Oxford night and perhaps
bells marking the
midnight."
An opportunity to serve & to share, to encourage & admonish, to evangelize & teach by example-- hospitality is one of the ways God lets us reach into another person's life, and pour ourselves out in servanthood in order to bless them.
Go under the Mercy!
--Gracy
uches the air; you can smell the change of season, as odd as it may sound. It's there- something softly hinting at harvest & hay, happiness and...
Dan making a 
