summer beauty from our garden

finding time

Caught up in the midst of packing, enjoying my summer, and finishing another great swim season, I found that I was finding it hard to balance everything...so I went in search of a book (just what I needed, right??) Well, I found Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald on Mama's bookshelf and have really enjoyed reading it. Here are a couple quotes that I thought convicting and encouraging:

‎"The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves and, we think, to others. To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know that the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single mindful breath, this has become the model of a successful life." -Wayne Muller

"Where you priorities are, there your time will be also." -Gordon MacDonald

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Both in history and in life it is a phenomenon by no means rare to meet with comparatively unlettered people who seem to have struck profound spiritual depths...while there are many highly educated people of whom one feels that they are performing clever antics with their minds to cover a gaping hollowness that lies within." -Herbert Butterfield

Perhaps people in deserts can hear and brood upon things not easily heard or thought about in busy cities where people are usually hurried, surrounded by noise, and steeped in self-importance. Sometimes in cities the shrillness of the public life is so great that the whispering voice of God cannot be heard. And sometimes in cities, people are too proud to listen to God amid all of their steel and concrete skyscrapers, their colorful theaters, or their incredible temples." -Gordon MacDonald

"We are governed by the tyranny of the urgent. Those of us with any sort of responsibility for leadership in vocation, in the home, or in out faith will find ourselves continually surrounded by events that cry out for immediate attention." -Charles Hummel

"Your challenge will not be in separating out the good from the bad, but in grabbing the best from all the possible good." -Gordon MacDonald

"I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber, one has some day to cry aloud from the house-top. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and I did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace." -Oscar Wilde