My Happy Place

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  “The floor was carpetless. The whitewashed walls were in parts scrawled over with strange diagrams, and in others covered with shelves crowded with philosophical instruments, the uses of many of which were unknown to me. On one side of the fireplace, stood a bookcase filled with dingy folios; on the other, a small organ, fantastically decorated with painted carvings of medieval saints and devils. Through the half-opened door of a cupboard at the further end of the room, I saw a long array of geological specimens, surgical preparations, crucibles, retorts, and jars of chemicals; while on the mantelshelf beside me, amid a number of small objects, stood a model of the solar system, a small galvanic battery, and a microscope. Every chair had its burden. Every corner was heaped high with books. The very floor was littered over with maps, casts, papers, tracings, and learned lumber of all conceivable kinds.” “The Phantom Coach” By Amelia Edwards (1831–1892)

Gone Fishin'?

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Were do you like to fish?

Where thousands of people are stepping all over each other, using the same bait in a lake known to have been heavily fished day after day for decades?

Perhaps you like to fish where the catch is already gorged with bait, swiming wearily away as you plop more bait-a-plenty near them?

Maybe you enjoy fishing for a place among fishermen, jockeying for the pole-position, stumbling over one another?

Or do you prefer to fish where the terrain may be difficult, where danger may lurk in the vicinity, where the lake is attainable only after sacrifice and hardship, but, oh, the hungry fish! Multitudes fight and starve for even one morsel of food, and many others have never so much as seen one time the bait you have to offer . . .

Is that you? Do you prefer the last fishing hole?

That is missions.

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