Leen Sadder | http://behance.net/LSadder
I’m a Lebanese designer in the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I’m obsessed with type, coincidences, food, travel and of course, anything remotely related to design.
Reminds me of the time I drew on the umbrella YN was gonna pass down to her successor ;) good times. So tempted to try it again!
(via iliketype)
(via musicalmelody)
SUNSET (by Kasia Gorol)
Finished my third book since the holidays started - C.S. Lewis’ ‘Mere Christianity’. Lewis is just too brilliant, and he does it so naturally and seemingly effortlessly, it’s all very mindblowing. I need to remember not to take his word for it though, and not to substitute his writings for the real thing. It IS incredibly enlightening nevertheless.
Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it.
Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen.
- Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
I think I am quite annoyed with the fact that everything that we can ever give to God is not already His own (as Lewis writes, and as ‘old’ Christians already know). It’s like you want to please someone, but you are presenting back to him the very gift he gave you, in an attempt to please him. How does that even work??
I guess if it’s of any comfort (to me), the thing is that in the spiritual ‘realm’ of things only efforts matter. And it should be a huge relief, from the workings of this world where sadly mostly only results matter, and to me who have tried so hard at everything only to fail in the very things I want to achieve.
I am now doubting if I ever fell in love at all.
Re-read Romans 4 today, and realised I never really got the concept of grace actually. Thinking back, I couldn’t even remember (not to say that there definitely wasn’t) any instances I experienced grace. Maybe that is why I couldn’t really get it.
I suppose faith is probably already accepting that we need grace, and believing that grace will be granted. And perhaps, as freely as grace is given, so as freely you must accept - as much as grace is granted, maybe we first need to need it.
Today I am also thinking about what it means to inherit the world.
The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment, as we must.
- Evelyn, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
It’s like I don’t even remember how I fell in love. Just … desperately trying to fall back in love again.
I wish I could do baptism all over again actually. Not so much the catechism, but the symbolism. Somehow the questions I always had are just demanding to be answered, and answered now. It’s not that kind of ‘oh I can just get them answered along the way’ anymore; rebellious is how I feel right now.
So … I’ve been pretty hung up over the whole thing about God giving us free will (among other things).
“The odd thing was that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. In a sense. I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armour, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armour or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corslet meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say, “I chose,” yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, “ I am what I do”. Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back – drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling.”
- Surprised by Joy (C.S. Lewis)
How? How does that even happen?
“You know what I think?” she says. “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed ‘em to the fire, they’re all just paper.”
After Dark
by Haruki Murakami
On this journey, and it feels like the life I’ve been living has been nothing but a lie and self-deluded dream. Can we really choose?
I can’t even describe or express how scary that God Himself is rocking the very foundation of my Christian faith and (less importantly) how I am serving (or think I am serving in that matter) with music.
I can say for sure that music is my life, but I also know (for now, and has been for a relatively long time to me now) that music is also paralysing my mind and my heart. I would very much like to stop using music to serve while I try to grapple with all these thoughts, but even in my unbelief God reminded me how He can use even my unbelief for His purpose.
So detached, yet so attached. So distant, yet so close. So convincing, yet so unbelievable.
On a separate note, I have finished ‘Surprised by Joy’!!
