Merry Christmas and a Happy 2018

Merry Christmas and a Happy 2017

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. Is. 9:2

Images of a Busy and Blessed Year 

Construction - Work - Teaching - Writing - Traveling - Planting Trees - Growing Older  - Enjoying Grand Children

Working with Intervarsity and at a needy community congregation have provided much encouragement and enjoyment.

With Thanksgiving - - - Paulo e Adriana

17 December, 1977 - 40 years - growing the graden

"The natural loves are not enough"
"My point is not that these dangers cannot be averted. They are averted daily by thousands of couples, but they are not averted by love itself. If love is to remain, it must be supported by outside help.... You need a firm will to justice, you need a will already pretty well formed or disciplined. In the long run you need the grace of God.... Its rather like a garden. A garden is a glorious thing, full of life, and giving us life. But you must not trust your garden to weed itself or fence itself, or prune itself, or anything of that sort. It hasn't got that kind of goodness. A garden left to nature will soon not be a garden. It is the same with our passions. They also are life giving. But when God planted that garden, he placed a man over it to dress it and set the man under Himself." 
(C.S. Lewis) 

With Grand Children  

Our Narnia - Cair Paravel House

Outside Kitchen

Cair Paravel

Cair Paravel Entrance Door

Cassava Harvest

Local Market

IVF Meeting

Ten Commandments - Mezuzah

Winter in Itajuba

Outing With the Sunday School Kids

Flying over Brasilia

Chicago with Ruth

Dallas with Adriana and Kids

Vadinho - For Morning Coffee

Bananas - -

Sunset

Meeting with Friends

At Church

Under Construction

Morning Fog

English Garden

Adriana at Work

Finding the Right Materials

Intervarsity Camping

Adriana's Flower Arrangments

View from Cair Paravel Guapuruvu

Resting

Planes having Fun

Pampa Grass

Cashews from Narnia

Flowers from Narnia

Adriana with her Father

IVF Meeting

IVF Meeting

Congregation - Vila Betel

Sunset - - From Cair Paravel Guapuruvu

Narnia Gate

Friends for Dinner

Narnia Gate at Night

Ipe Amarelo

"Come out, look back, and then you will see... this astonishing
cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge of
atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes
and toads. How could you ever have thought this was the ultimate
reality? How could you ever have thought that it was merely a
stage-set for the moral drama of men and women?
Nature is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt."
C.S Lewis

Ipê Amerelo

Festa para os Olhos

Around the Sul de Minas

Catching Clouds - Pictures from a short drive around the Sul de Minas

‘Beauty descends from God into nature: but there it would perish and does except when a Man appreciates it with worship and thus as it were sends it back to God” so that through his consciousness what descended ascends again and the perfect circle is made.’

"Nature is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this incorrigible fairy - - -

But the theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The ‘vanity’ to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence … We shall still be able to recognize our old enemy, friend, playfellow and foster mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself. And that will be a merry meeting."

"At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of he door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch."

Natal & 2016-2017

Feliz Natal e Blessed 2017 - From Narnia - Cair Paravel (under construction)

We have had a busy, blessed, full of beauty and challenges in 2016

Trips, children, work, flowers, birds, true friends, pains, heart attacks - - -

"Come out, look back, and then you will see... this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads. How could you ever have thought this was the ultimate reality? 

How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women?

 Nature [and life] is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt."

And in this context we celebrate Christmas - - The Myth That Became Fact

"Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens-at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.

A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it. The modernist-the extreme modernist, infidel in all but name-need not be called a fool or hypocrite because he obstinately retains, even in the midst of his intellectual atheism, the language, rites, sacraments, and story of the Christians. The poor man may be clinging (with a wisdom he himself by no means understands) to that which is his life. - - -

Those who do not know that this great myth became fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied. But Christians also need to be reminded—that what became fact was a myth, that it carries with it into the world of fact all the properties of a myth. God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about "parallels" and "pagan Christs": they ought to be there-it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic-and is not the sky itself a myth-shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher."

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. Is. 9:2

Merry Christmas - Feliz Natal


2016-2017

"We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good; if bad, because it works in us patience, humility, contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country."

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

Cheers to you all

Paulo and Adriana - just celebrated 40 years of our blessed marriage.