Author Archives

Norma L. Brumbaugh

Inspirational Writer, Author, and Speaker

PO Box 6432, Chico, CA 95927
nlbrumbaugh@gmail.com

Keep a smile in your heart.

ONE THOUSAND GIFTS: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp (Zondervan, 2010)

“I see it clear, June coming in bright on the breeze through open window: there is no real reality, no full life, outside of the relationship with Love, because God Himself wraps Himself eternally in relationship: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit existing in relationship, an encircling dance of communion sweetest. God is love–everywhere! every thing!– and He can only be love because He exists in triune relationship. . . . I too am lavished with the love the Father has for the Son. In union, that love is mine–ours! ”  Ann Voskamp

One Thousand Gifts was given to me as a gift by a dear friend. I wasn’t too far into it when I realized I would need to adjust to her use of language. The purpose of the book delivers and delivers. The reader is constantly faced with the spiritual during the stressful, the things of God when life and loss doesn’t seem right or fair. We are on the journey with Ann. We feel her pain. We know her frustrations. She lets us see into confusing, contradictory thoughts that make up the stuff of real life. I like it. And, I appreciate where the journey takes her. Looking to the good, finding the tiniest of celebrations, seizing the forms of beauty that make up our days, is what Ann challenges us to “pay attention” to as she chronicles crawling out of the darkness into the light by living in Eucharisteo, in constant communion with God. The pain has found its comfort, and that comfort is in the Creator and Sustainer.  I appreciate the encouragement that this sweet book offers to all who have been hurt by heart-breaking loss and buried by unspoken pain. It is time to live fully right where you are. One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

 

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God and Nature

FB July 2011 003

MORNING CONTEMPLATION

The love of God transcends all things. One cannot adequately express it. His love is boundless, and it always “is.” God never changes. We can always count on him to be the same. He keeps me singing. I love him.

There are places we sense God’s love. The ocean shores—the waves breaking on its coastline. The mountain—its peaks, lakes, streams, and animal-kind. The desert—with its still, graceful beauty, its creatures, and its wildness. The rainforest—with its color and life, the tropical birds of vibrancy unmatched, the snakes, and the canopy layers of plant-life. The ocean depths—with their exotic and vast array of living movement, the coral, the fish, the crustaceans, the whales, dolphins, sharks and porpoises and much, much more. The African plain, the Australian Outback, the Himalayan mountain peaks, the glacial waterways, the oasis’ in the Saharan desert, the multiplicity of stars and planets, comets and pulsars in the galaxy that we observe as we stretch out and stare during a clear night’s sky. Some of these wonders I have seen. Others I have viewed on the internet, in videos, or in books. All speak to the glory of God, his magnificence and brilliance.

Love created the galaxy and its universe. We are such a miniscule part of it all. Even a single cell and even an atom when seen under magnification looks like a piece of precision art. Its form has both order and design. I am sitting here thinking of the wide array of formations in nature that are the natural wonders of this world, many of them inaccessible in faraway places. One cannot quite grasp the magnitude of it all though we wish to.

I am ready to leave the monastery grounds and now I see Kitty. She is stretched out on the grass some thirty paces behind me in a shaded area near the gray cottage. I speak to her and she lifts her head. She doesn’t bother to get up. This is it for today. My heart is full and I am content.

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N. L. Brumbaugh, with a writing sample from my Vina Monastery book, “The Sacred Place”

PURCHASE: THE MEETING PLACE by N. L. BRUMBAUGH