Love Songs: Unchained Melodies

My friends and I were such romantics when we were teenagers.  Great love was waiting out there somewhere, someday to ride into our lives on a magnificent white charger.  I still love the stories of knights and their ladies.  

Is it any wonder?  All these marvelous love songs with their unchained melodies were the background music of our lives!

“Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers

“Only You,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “The Great Pretender,” all these in one video by The Platters

“Earth Angel”--   the Penguins

“Since I Don’t Have You” by The Skyliners

“Sixteen Candles”  by The Crests

“There’s a Moon Out Tonight” by The Capris

“I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” by Elvis Presley

And especially…. “In the Still of the Night” by The Five Satins

The picture of Isolde and Tristan comes from this site:

http://www.squidoo.com/arthur-women    

Love Songs: Unchained Melodies

http://connectionsgodandtheworld.blogspot.com/2010/08/love-songs-unchained-melodies.html

Truth: Facing It

The typical living room has an invisible elephant standing in the middle of it, proverbially speaking. People who live in the house carefully skirt around it and try hard to keep from tripping over it. They feed it and keep it quiet.


 In today’s entry of My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers says, “Continually bring the truth out into actuality; work it out in every domain, or the very light you have will prove a curse.”


One of the easiest things to do is gloss over truth. It is much more pleasant to pretend problems do not exist than to confront them. Confronting difficult situations can be complex and thorny, not to mention, daunting.


If we don’t bring out the truth into the daylight and stand on it, things become crazy and shifty. If we let falsehood be in charge of our lives, life becomes, as OC says, full of darkness, shot through with flakinesss and a feeling of instability. Whatever truth remains will be tarnished and shoved around by irony. And that's darkness.


Truth must be worked into every aspect of our lives. How? We can’t do it alone. Often we are too used to being self-sufficient. If we seek God, he gives us the help we need. In 2008, I wrote this:


He will be found if we want him—if we reach out, cry out, just say the word. Lots of people today (and always) think we can heal ourselves, actualize ourselves, fulfill ourselves. We can’t. People are imperfect; only God is perfect—only he has the answers we need. Love is the only source of healing. And God is the only real source of love; if we feel love, it’s because God put it there as a part of himself.


God is the ultimate truth. All other truth rests on him. Out with elephants.


The picture is me, quietly feeding elephants.

Truth: Facing It

http://connectionsgodandtheworld.blogspot.com/2010/08/truth-facing-it.html

Great-Tailed Grackles

 I first experienced grackles when I was in college in Austin, TX, many years ago. Their loud whistles and gravelly squawks seemed cute and friendly to me. Click this linked site to hear a sample! God has a good sense of humor.

They made themselves entirely at home, wherever they were. Stalking around in a lordly manner, they obviously felt free to partake of any and all bugs that made the unfortunate decision to remain out in the open.

My family lived a couple of hundred miles farther north, and my home town had nary a grackle. They were citizens of the south. 

Then about fifteen years later, I heard that familiar whistle. I rounded up my small children, and we took binoculars to the back yard to find the grackle. There he was, perched at the very top of our neighbor’s tall pine tree, whistling away. From then on, the grackle population has continued to increase, and now they make up a large number of our bird citizenry.

Many people complain about them, but I still find them entertaining and funny—that is, except when they roost in the trees over our driveway and deposit their waste on our cars. A big plastic owl keeps watch, though, and they seem to believe it is real. As long as he guards the place, they find other trees for roosting.

The picture comes from this blog: From My Perch: Great-tailed Grackles

Great-Tailed Grackles

http://connectionsgodandtheworld.blogspot.com/2010/08/grackles.html