But Ham protested unto Noah

     Three African-American young people came and sat down in the pew in front of mine, next to an aged woman and two bored children. The woman looked uneasily, disdainfully at the late-comers.
     My colleague next to me asked me a question and I was whispering something to him. It was during the offertory and people do briefly converse during this time. The old lady in front of us turned around, looked irately at me and cantankerously huffed in my ear as I leaned in, “I’ve trained these children for years to be quiet in church and YOU’RE NOT SUPPORTING.”
     And I said, “Sister, if you’ve been teaching these children for years to be quiet in church, you should’ve been teaching them to love Jesus. And I’m not sure if you’re even capable of that.

On doctrine and covenants

"When I started to preach at twenty-five years of age, I held to one hundred doctrines; at thirty-five, I had fifty; at fifty, only twenty-five; later on, there were but ten; and now as I am facing eternity I hold only this one: I am a great sinner, but Jesus is a great Savior."
— Thomas D. Talmage

Somebody Else's Thoughts, No. 5

A Christmas Carol, Sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall
by Robert Herrick

Dark and dull night, fly hence away,

And give the honour to this Day,

That sees December turned to May.

If we may ask the reason, say

The why and wherefore all things here

Seem like the Spring-time of the year?

Why does chilling Winters morn

Smile like a field beset with corn?

Or smell like to a Mead new-shorn,

Thus, on the sudden? Come and see

The cause, why things thus fragrant be:

Tis He is born, whose quickening birth

Gives life and luster, public mirth,

To Heaven and the under-Earth.

We see him come and know him ours,

Who, with his sunshine and his showers

Turns all the patient ground to flowers.

The darling of the world is come

And fit it is, we find a room

To welcome him. The nobler part

Of all the house here, is the heart.

Which we will give him, and bequeath

The Holly, and this Ivy wreath,

To do him honour, who's our King,

And Lord of all this revelling.

On God and wrath in the Old Testament

“I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn't God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love."  

— Miroslav Volf, professor of theology, Yale School of Divinity; from Free of Charge, 2006.