Happy birthday, Melissa! You are the love of my life!!! Every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of Lights! I am so thankful to God for you!!

“The time we spend praising God together is not meant to be an escape from reality, or a time to forget about our troubles and our cares. Quite the opposite. When we worship God, we are gaining a truer picture of reality than we’ll ever have. That is the time to look directly at our problems and say, “God is bigger than you!” We aren’t meant to forget our troubles; we’re meant to overcome them by the Word and the Spirit of God” (from “Corporate Worship: Responding to God” by Bob Kauflin).

“The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, ‘Is it true?’ . . . In the ‘eucatastrophe’ we see in brief vision that the answer may be greater–it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world . . . The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels–peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: ‘mythical’ in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story [i.e. the Christian Story] has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation [those who write and enjoy fanatasy literature] has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality’. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true.” ~J.R.R. Tolkien