Mosaic Of Life Quotes

We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.

Crippled in the mind, some can no longer bring home their soul in the mosaic of their thinking pattern. By changing the logic model of our mindset, becoming an apprentice of new matters, and turning our emotional approach upside down, we can bring dormant energy to life and restore mental balance. (The freedom of new thinking)

Our lives are unique stones in the mosaic of human existence -- priceless and irreplaceable.

Sometimes you didn't really arrive at a conclusion about your life, you just discovered that you already had.

The scenes in our life resemble pictures in a rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful. That is why to attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and why, though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving as the only road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have been living the whole time ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived.

My whole life I’d always felt a little fractured and scattered. Probably because it was always someone else trying to decide what I needed to be. I was a mosaic of someone else’s design where none of the fragments were put in the right place. And now I had finally put myself together and I recognized myself for the very first time.

Life has a way of shattering our expectations, of leaving our hopes in pieces without explanation. But when there's love in a family, the fragments left behind from our shattered dreams can always be pulled together again, even if the end result is a mosaic.

Too bad the freedom seemed like a prison. As his boots hit the mosaic floor at the bottom of the stairs, John Mellencamp's old-school, bic-lighter anthem echoed in his head-and though he'd always like the song okay, he'd never truly understood what it meant. Kind of wished that were still the case. Life goes on...long after the thrill of living is gone...

Amazing, when you thought about it: how quickly-made decisions became the life you lived.

He wanted to achieve something of surpassing beauty that would last. A creation that would mean that he--the mosaic worker Caius Crispus of Varena--had been born, and lived a life, and had come to understand a portion of the nature of the world, of what ran through and beneath the deeds of women and men in their souls and in the beauty and the pain of their short living beneath the sun.

Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruin of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash.

Maybe, she thinks, this is simply what living is: an infinite list of transgressions that did not weigh against the joys but that simply overlaid them, the two lists mingling and merging, all the small moments that made up the mosaic of a person, a relationship, a life.

The crash all those years ago shattered the life I had, but the pieces wound up making a pretty good mosaic. That's what art is, I suppose: transforming things from what they were into what they could be. My life now, without question, is transformed. Maybe that makes it a work of art.

And the child, Francie Nolan, was of all the Rommelys and all the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely's mysticism, her tale-telling, her great belief in everything and her compassion for the weak ones. She had a lot of her grandfather Rommely's cruel will. She had some of her Aunt Evy's talent for mimicking, some of Ruthie Nolan's possessiveness. She had Aunt Sissy's love for life and her love for children. She had Johnny's sentimentality without his good looks. She had all of Katie's soft ways and only half of the invisible steel of Katie. She was made up of all these good and these bad things. She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Kitie's secret, desparing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only- the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life- the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

Small things change a life. Change lives.

What he understands is that life has suffering in it, can’t not have suffering in it, because in life there is everything. Life is a mosaic of everything,

Your life is like a mosaic, a puzzle. You have to figure out where the pieces go and put them together for yourself.

If you pay attention to those aspects of God that demonstrate love, truth, beauty, intelligence, order, and spiritual evolution, those aspects will begin to expand in your life. Bit by bit, like a mosaic, disparate fragments of grace will merge to form a complete picture. Eventually this picture will replace the ore threatening one you have carried around inside you since infancy.

You may hang your walls with tapestry instead of whitewash or paper; or you may cover them with mosaic; or have them frescoed by a great painter: all this is not luxury, if it be done for beauty's sake, and not for show: it does not break our golden rule: Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful

I thought of relationships as a mosaic, and I put more stock in the overall picture, not the individual tiles. Life was too damned short to make every moment poignant, and too damned long to make every moment perfect. You fought, you made up, you cried, you laughed, and hopefully, when you stepped back, the picture was still beautiful.

It was so strange to realize how it was only at this brink of the chasm, threshold of the dark or the god's holy light, that one could grasp and accept one's own heart's yearning for more of the world. For life.

Today Means Amen Dear you, whoever you are, however you got here, this is exactly where you are supposed to be. This moment has waited its whole life for you. This moment is your lover and you are a soldier. Come home, baby, it's over. You don't need to suffer anymore. Dear you, this moment is your surprise party. You are both hiding in the dark and walking through the door. This moment is a hallelujah. This moment is your permission slip to finally open that love letter you've been hiding from yourself, the one you wrote when you were little when you still danced like a sparkler at dusk. Do you remember the moment you realized they were watching? When you became ashamed of how much light you were holding? When you first learned how to unlove yourself? Dear you, the word today means amen in every language. Today, we made it. Today, I'm going to love you. Today, I'm going to love myself. Today, the boxcutter will rust in the garbage. The noose will forget how to hold you, today, today-- Dear you, and I have always meant you, nothing would be the same if you did not exist. You, whose voice is someone's favorite voice, someone's favorite face to wake up to. Nothing would be the same if you did not exist. You, the teacher, the starter's gun, the lantern in the night who offers not a way home, but the courage to travel farther into the dark. You, the lover, who worships the taste of her body, who is the largest tree ring in his heart, who does not let fear ration your love. You, the friend, the sacred chorus of how can I help. You, who have felt more numb than holy, more cracked than mosaic. Who have known the tiles of a bathroom by heart, who have forgotten what makes you worth it. You, the forgiven, the forgiver, who belongs right here in this moment. You, this clump of cells, this happy explosion that happened to start breathing, and by the grace of whatever is up there, you got here. You made it this whole way: through the nights that swallowed you whole, the mornings that arrived in pieces. The scabs, the gravel, the doubt, the hurt, the hurt, the hurt is over. Today, you made it. You made it. You made it here.

I’ve always thought of mosaic as this big metaphor for my life,” she says. “All these jagged, incongruous pieces…” She holds up a small shard of milky jade-green glass. “These are like the things that happen to you. But if it’s laid out a certain way and if you take a step back from it, it makes sense.

I was in Sarasota, Florida, on a spring-break trip with my friends Bruce and Karen Moore. Bruce and I were waiting on the beach for the rest of our crew when and a man and his grown kids came strolling up the sand. They looked at me for a minute, sort of hesitating, and then asked, "Would you mind taking a picture?" "Sure," I said, and quickly arranged all of us in a line, putting myself in the middle and motioning to Bruce to come snap the photo. Right about that time, the father said, "Actually, we were wondering if you could take a picture just of us." An understandable mistake on my part, but really embarrassing. Bruce has had a field day reminding me of that one ever since. Lesson learned: Never assume anything about your own importance. It's a great big world, and all of us are busy living our lives. None of us knows all the time and effort that another person puts into his or her passion.

…but beautiful mosaics are made of broken pieces.

But what did one own if life, if love, could be taken away to darkness? Was it all not just ... a loan, a leasehold, transitory as candles?

The desire of our inner self to express life’s possibilities is like the art of mosaic, a journey of applying colors and shapes within small scaled patterns.

Fishing provides time to think, and reason not to. If you have the virtue of patience, an hour or two of casting alone is plenty of time to review all you’ve learned about the grand themes of life. It’s time enough to realize that every generalization stands opposed by a mosaic of exceptions, and that the biggest truths are few indeed. Meanwhile, you feel the wind shift and the temperature change. You might simply decide to be present, and observe a few facts about the drifting clouds…Fishing in a place is a meditation on the rhythm of a tide, a season, the arc of a year, and the seasons of life... I fish to scratch the surface of those mysteries, for nearness to the beautiful, and to reassure myself the world remains. I fish to wash off some of my grief for the peace we so squander. I fish to dip into that great and awesome pool of power that propels these epic migrations. I fish to feel- and steal- a little of that energy.

Who can find a proper grave for such damaged mosaics of the mind, where they may rest in pieces? Life goes on, but in two temporal directions at once, the future unable to escape the grip of a memory laden with grief.”31

God gave Moses a calendar that began in spring. (Ex 12:2) God Himself emphasized the importance of Israel’s new calendar at Ex 23:16; Le 23:34 and De 16:13. God’s calendar was for marking, and keeping, God’s holy days. Using a foreign calendar became illegal. Ignoring Israel’s new calendar could cost an Israelite their life. (Nu 15:32-35) Yet, the Jewish calendar is not the only calendar. There are plenty of calendars to choose from: Assyrian; Egyptian; Iranian; Armenian; Ethiopian; Hindu; Coptic; Mayan; Chinese; Julian; Byzantine; Islamic and Gregorian; just to mention a few. Has the Seventh Day Adventists settled on any one of these calendars? Which one?

In all the lands ruled by that City, with its domes and its bronze and golden doors, its palaces and gardens and statues, forums and theatres and colonnades, bathhouses and shops and guildhalls, taverns and whorehouses and sanctuaries and the great Hippodrome, its triple landward walls that had never yet been breached, and its deep, sheltered harbour and the guarded and guarding seas, there was a timeworn phrase that had the same meaning in every tongue and every dialect. To say of a man that he was sailing to Sarantium was to say that his life was on the cusp of change: poised for emergent greatness, brilliance, fortune – or else at the very precipice of a final and absolute fall as he met something to vast for his capacity. Valerius the Trakesian had become an Emperor.

Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another. It was here that you’d find the resourcefulness of rot, the wholeness of fungi.

Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one's stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass. And yet whose unearthly beauty compelled one to say: God forgive me.

The scenes of our life are like pictures in rough mosaic, which have no effect at close quarters, but must be looked at from a distance in order to discern their beauty. So that to obtain something we have desired is to find out that it is worthless; we are always living in expectation of better things, while, at the same time, we often repent and long for things that belong to the past. We accept the present as something that is only temporary, and regard it only as a means to accomplish our aim. So that most people will find if they look back when their life is at an end, that they have lived their lifelong ad interim, and they will be surprised to find that something they allowed to pass by unnoticed and unenjoyed was just their life — that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived. And so it may be said of man in general that, befooled by hope, he dances into the arms of death.

Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world—all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation…the vastness of St. Peter’s the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

A feeling of superiority counteracts imitation. Had the millions of immigrants who came to this country been superior people—the cream of the countries they came from—there would have been not one U.S.A. but a mosaic of lingual and cultural groups. It was due to the fact that the majority of the immigrants were of the lowest and the poorest, the despised and the rejected, that the heterogeneous millions blended so rapidly and thoroughly. They came here with the ardent desire to shed their old world identity and be reborn to a new life; and they were automatically equipped with an unbounded capacity to imitate and adopt the new. The strangeness of the new country attracted rather than repelled them. They craved a new identity and a new life—and the stranger the new world the more it suited their inclination.

Being a mosaic does not necessarily mean scattering into pieces, answered Elder Innokenty. It is only up close that each separate little stone seems not to be connected to the others. There is something more important in each of them, O Laurus: striving for the one who looks from afar. For the one who is capable of seizing all the small stones at once. It is he who gathers them with his gaze. That, O Laurus, is how it is in your life, too. You have dissolved yourself in God. You disrupted the unity of your life, renouncing your name and your very identity. But in the mosaic of your life there is also something that joins all these separate parts: it is an aspiration for Him. They will gather together again in Him.

Though it is not a direct article of the christian system that this world that we inhabit is the whole of the habitable creation, yet it is so worked up therewith, from what is called the Mosaic account of the creation, the story of Eve and the apple, and the counterpart of that story, the death of the Son of God, that to believe otherwise, that is, to believe that God created a plurality of worlds, at least as numerous as what we call stars, renders the christian system of faith at once little and ridiculous; and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air. The two beliefs can not be held together in the same mind; and he who thinks that be believes both, has thought but little of either. ...And, on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called the Son of God, and sometimes God himself, would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentary interval of life.

The mosaic is so rich and varied that a hiker who descends from the highest point on the North Rim to the lowest point inside the canyon will pass through a spectrum of life equivalent to moving from the cool boreal forests of subarctic Canada to the sunstruck deserts of Mexico that lie just above the Tropic of Cancer—thereby compressing a distribution of plants and animals that typically stretch over more than two thousand horizontal miles into a single vertical mile.

I know people who read interminably, book after book, from page to page, and yet I should not call them 'well-read people'. Of course they 'know' an immense amount; but their brain seems incapable of assorting and classifying the material which they have gathered from books. They have not the faculty of distinguishing between what is useful and useless in a book; so that they may retain the former in their minds and if possible skip over the latter while reading it, if that be not possible, then--when once read--throw it overboard as useless ballast. Reading is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Its chief purpose is to help towards filling in the framework which is made up of the talents and capabilities that each individual possesses. Thus each one procures for himself the implements and materials necessary for the fulfilment of his calling in life, no matter whether this be the elementary task of earning one's daily bread or a calling that responds to higher human aspirations. Such is the first purpose of reading. And the second purpose is to give a general knowledge of the world in which we live. In both cases, however, the material which one has acquired through reading must not be stored up in the memory on a plan that corresponds to the successive chapters of the book; but each little piece of knowledge thus gained must be treated as if it were a little stone to be inserted into a mosaic, so that it finds its proper place among all the other pieces and particles that help to form a general world-picture in the brain of the reader. Otherwise only a confused jumble of chaotic notions will result from all this reading. That jumble is not merely useless, but it also tends to make the unfortunate possessor of it conceited. For he seriously considers himself a well-educated person and thinks that he understands something of life. He believes that he has acquired knowledge, whereas the truth is that every increase in such 'knowledge' draws him more and more away from real life, until he finally ends up in some sanatorium or takes to politics and becomes a parliamentary deputy. Such a person never succeeds in turning his knowledge to practical account when the opportune moment arrives; for his mental equipment is not ordered with a view to meeting the demands of everyday life. His knowledge is stored in his brain as a literal transcript of the books he has read and the order of succession in which he has read them. And if Fate should one day call upon him to use some of his book-knowledge for certain practical ends in life that very call will have to name the book and give the number of the page; for the poor noodle himself would never be able to find the spot where he gathered the information now called for. But if the page is not mentioned at the critical moment the widely-read intellectual will find himself in a state of hopeless embarrassment. In a high state of agitation he searches for analogous cases and it is almost a dead certainty that he will finally deliver the wrong prescription.

Every coin has two sides. Every mountain has a valley. For every strength there is a weakness. Every up has a down. For every in there is an out. For every height there is a depth. Life itself is a mosaic of light and dark. And every human is a study in opposites, a kaleidoscope of good and bad, positive and negative, hopes and losses, dreams and disappointments, successes and failures, courage and fear, confidence and insecurity, power and vulnerability. We do not live in a homogeneous world. We live in a world of brilliant contrasts, vivid diversity, striking polarity, and eloquent disparity...a stunning array of sometimes gorgeous, sometimes glaring, always fascinating differences.

Life is a fragmented mosaic; but the art of existence is within its combination.

Don’t regret the past, sometimes things happen for a good reason. Life is like a mosaic. From up close it may seem like a mess, but from afar it creates a beautiful picture.

The land we grow up on patterns us, we become a part of the energetic mosaic of the living experience that draws its life from the land and draws its breath from the trees.

There’s a certain vulgarity in assigning worth to any individual life when each represents a piece in the mosaic of the whole.

The best gift that parents can give their children is their own life fully lived, and that’s the gift my father gave me.

Owen took Nora’s hand and squeezed it. She leaned her head against his arm, and beneath the layers of grime and torn silk and the frantic beating of her heart, something whispered to her. A cool cup of water soothing her parched throat. A breeze in the middle of India’s scorching summer. A dance beneath monsoon rains. This is right. This is good. This is worth it.

People say that America has no religion, but it's the opposite: America has every religion, all the old ones, and produces more new ones than anywhere else on earth. America;'s religious life is like the photo mosaic in which a thousand little images add up to one big picture, except there's no big picture, just a blob of unrelated and unrelatable images, texts, and poses, the freedom to take what you want from a religion and reject hte rest and be lonely, standing outsdie the warm shelters of temples with your own goon god that no one else can understand.

Who can find a proper grave for such damaged mosaics of the mind, where they may rest in pieces? Life goes on, but in two temporal directions at once, the future unable to escape the grip of a memory laden in grief.

“I would’ve followed you anywhere,” he mumbles, his voice raw with agony. “All I ever wanted was to spend forever with my best friend. With the girl who gave life to my paintings. But I’m not the one who inspired your mosaics, am I? It was always Wonderland. That’s why you chose him.” “Chose him? It was a kiss, that’s all—” “It’s not the kiss. Sometimes words are louder than actions.” “Words . . . ? What words?” “The promise you gave him that you couldn’t give me.”

He was not someone who celebrated his hometown as a glorious mosaic, and he made fun of people who did. But he admired - how could you not? - the collective amount of labour, real labour, that his trainmates had no doubt accomplished that day.

The art of literature stands apart from among its sisters, because the material in which the literary artist works is the dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of address to the public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation.  The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller’s clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words.

Life has a way of shattering our expectations, of leaving our hopes in pieces without explanation. But when there’s love in a family, the fragments left behind from our shattered dreams can always be pulled together again, even if the end result is a mosaic.

Life has a way of shattering our expectations, of leaving our hopes in pieces without explanation. But when there's love in a family, the fragments left behind from our shattered dreams can always be pulled together again, even if the end result is a mosaic.

Members brought books, precious objects, and records of creature history to the city and purchased an island in the lagoon from the Catholic Church: Isola della Stella (Island of Stars). On it were monastic buildings that were converted to suit the Congregation's purposes. ..the vast, ancient monastery library, filled with books, papers, and papyri;...This council chamber, with its stunning frescoes, mosaics, vaulted ceiling, and gallery where the most precious records are kept, embodies the Congregation's power.

The course and affairs of our individual life, in view of their true meaning and connection, are like a piece of crude work in mosaic. So long as one stands close in front of it, one can not correctly see the objects presented, or perceive their importance and beauty; it is only by standing some distance away that both come into view. And in the same way one often understands the true connection of important events in one’s own life, not while they are happening, or even immediately after they have happened, but only a long time afterwards.

(...) The floor itself was inscribed with a mosaic in the data-pattern mode, representing the entire body of the Curia case law. At the center, small icons representing constitutional principles sent out lines to each case in which they were quoted; bright lines for controlling precedent, dim lines for dissenting opinions or dicta. Each case quoted in a later case sent out additional lines, till the concentric circles of floor-icons were meshed in a complex network. The jest of the architect was clear to Phaethon. The floor mosaic was meant to represent the fixed immutability of the law; but the play of light from the pool above made it seem to ripple and sway and change with each little breeze. Above the floor, not touching it, without sound or motion, hovered three massive cubes of black material. These cubes were the manifestations of the Judges. The cube shape symbolized the solidity and implacable majesty of the law. Their high position showed they were above emotionalism or earthly appeals. The crown of each cube bore a thick-armed double helix of heavy gold. The gold spirals atop the black cubes were symbols of life, motion, and energy. Perhaps they represented the active intellects of the Curia. Or perhaps they represented that life and civilization rested on the solid foundations of the law. If so, this was another jest of the architect. The law, it seemed, rested on nothing.

In studying elementary law, I found the old authors frequently quoting the Scriptures, and referring especially to the Mosaic Institutes, as authority for many of the great principles of common law. This excited my curiosity so much that I went and purchased a Bible, the first I had ever owned; and whenever I found a reference by the law authors to the Bible, I turned to the passage and consulted it in its connection. This soon led to my taking a new interest in the Bible, and I read and meditated on it much more than I had ever done before in my life. However, much of it I did not understand.

She did not like bigots or brilliant bores or academicians who wore their honors, or scholars who wore their doctorates, like dogtags. But she had an infinite capacity to love peasants and children and great but simple causes across the board and a grace in giving that was itself gratitude and she had a body like sculpture in the thinnest of wire and a face made of a million mosaics in a gauze-web of cubes lighter than air and a piñata of a heart in the center of a mobile at fiesta time with bits of her soul swirling in the breeze in honor of life and love and Good Morning to you, Bon Jour, Muy Buenos, Muy Buenos! Muy Buenos! On Nancy Cunard

Now, here's the real beauty of this contorting contradiction. Both working mothers and stay-at-home mothers get to be failures. The ethos of intensive mothering has lower status in our culture ("stay-at-home mothers are boring"), but occupies a higher moral ground ("working mothers are neglectful"). So, welcome to the latest media catfight: the supposed war between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. Why analyze all the ways in which our country has failed to support families while inflating the work ethic to the size of the Hindenburg when you can, instead, project this paradox onto what the media have come to call, incessantly, "the mommy wars." The "mommy wars" puts mothers into two, mutually exclusive categories--working mother versus stay-at-home mother, and never the twain shall meet. It goes without saying that they allegedly hate each other's guts. In real life, millions of mothers move between these two categories, have been one and then the other at various different times, creating a mosaic of work and child-rearing practices that bears no resemblance to the supposed ironclad roles suggested by the "mommy wars." Not only does the media catfight pit mother against mother, but it suggests that all women be reduced to their one role--mother--or get cut out of the picture entirely.

Maybe, she thinks, this is simply what living is: an infinite list of transgressions that did not weigh against the joys but that simply overlaid them, the two lists mingling and merging all the small moments that made up the mosaic of a person, a relationship, a life. What Bird will learn, then: That his mother is fallible. That she is only human, too.

Being a mosaic does not necessarily mean scattering into pieces, answered Elder Innokenty. It is only up close that each separate little stone seems not to be connected to the others. There is something more important in each of them, O Laurus: striving for the one who looks from afar. For the one who is capable of seizing all the small stones at once. It is he who gathers them with his gaze. That, O Laurus, is how it is in your life, too. You have dissolved yourself in God. You disrupted the unity of your life, renouncing your name and your very identity. But in the mosaic of your life there is also something that joins all those separate parts: it is an aspiration for Him. They will gather together again in Him.

The more I stare at it, the more the popcorn ceiling above me resembles an exquisite mosaic. Yellow rings from a leaky roof add pizazz to the imperfect white mounds; the reflection of a parked car outside the hotel room highlights the design in a brilliant, abstract pattern. I try to find a name for this provocative image and decide on “Cottage Cheese, Glorified.” And that’s when it becomes obvious that I’m distracting myself from thinking about the U-turn my life just took. I wonder if Galen is back yet. I wonder what he’s thinking. I wonder if Rayna is okay, if she has a killer headache like I do, if chloroform affects a full-blooded Syrena the way it affects humans. I bet that now she really will try to shoot my mom with her harpoon, which reminds me again of the past twenty-four hours of craziness.

All I know is that you can survive. You have to! You can climb higher. You want to! Don't give up. No matter what ... Don't give up on your children ... on your mate ... on your sanity ... on your faith. As far as I know ... we only have one life ... take your sour lemons and make lemonade ... look at whatever positives you can ... but believe ... if you keep on ... step-by-step ... you will not only survive, you will rise.

CLARITIES OF FAITH Not that there are no clarities in the life of faith. There are. Vast, soaring harmonies; deep, satisfying meanings; rich, textured experiences. But these clarities develop from within. They cannot be imposed from without. They cannot be hurried. It is not a matter of hurriedly arranging "dead things into a dead mosaic, but of living forces into a great equilibrium."' The clarities of faith are organic and personal, not mechanical and institutional. Faith invades the muddle; it does not eliminate it. Peace develops in the midst of chaos. Harmony is achieved slowly, quietly, unobtrusively-like the effects of salt and light. Such clarities result from a courageous commitment to God, not from controlling or being controlled by others. Such clarities come from adventuring deep into the mysteries of God's will and love, not by cautiously managing and moralizing in ways that minimize risk and guarantee self-importance. These clarities can only be experienced in acts of faith and only recognized with the eyes of faith. Jeremiah's life was brilliantly supplied with such clarities, but they were always surrounded by hopeless disarray. Sometimes devout and sometimes despairing, Jeremiah doubted himself and God. But these internal agonies never seemed to have interfered with his vocation and his commitment. He argued with God but he did not abandon him. He was clear

A whole stack of them, lined with the stories of others, all with their own memories and regrets, all their failings and love, all things they wished they could tell the children they might never see again. Maybe, she thinks, this is simply what living is: an infinite list of transgressions that did not weigh against the joys but that simply overlaid them, the two lists mingling and merging, all the small moments that made up the mosaic of a person, a relationship, a life.

By far, the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives. The mind, sense-making organ that it is, does not interpret our experiences as if they were shattered shards of glass; it assembles them into a mosaic. From the distance of years, we see the mosaic’s pattern. It seems tangible, unchangeable; we can’t imagine how we could reconfigure those pieces into another design. But it is a result of years of telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villians, an account of how we came to be the way we are. Because that narrative is the way we understand the world and our place in it, it is bigger than the sum of its parts. If on part, one memory, is shown to be wrong, people have to reduce the resulting dissonance and even rethink the basic mental category: you mean Dad (Mom) wasn’t such a bad (good) person after all? You mean Dad (Mom) was a complex human being? The life narrative may be fundamentally true; Your father or mother might really have been hateful, or saintly. The problem is that when the narrative becomes a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings, memory becomes warped in its service. The storyteller remembers only the confirming examples of the parent’s malevolence and forgets the dissonant instances of the parent’s good qualities. Over time, as the story hardens, it becomes more difficult to see the whole parent — the mixture of good and bad, strengths and flaws, good intentions and unfortunate blunders. Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories.

It’s like David in the Bible when his child got sick. He ripped his clothes and shaved his head and wouldn’t eat and prayed all day and begged and cried and everyone was scared to tell him that the boy was dead. But when he found out he washed his face and ate breakfast. When there’s still a chance to salvage something you torture yourself. When it’s gone, you wash your face. You wake up. You start picking up the pieces, no matter how tiny and scattered they are. And then suddenly, the life that you had that was whole is suddenly a mosaic made of the old pieces. And something entirely new. I don’t know how. I just know it happens.

John Quincy Adams on Islam: “In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE…. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant…While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.” (Emphasis in the original)

What Jesus teaches in regard to violence is so radical that it almost doesn’t even make sense. When we serve an Americanized version of Jesus, we tend to subconsciously imagine that Jesus would have said something to the effect of, “Don’t use violence unless you really and truly fear that your life may be in danger.” However, that isn’t what he taught—Jesus repeatedly taught that those who actually “follow” him must adopt a position of nonviolent love of enemies. This new ethic of nonviolence was not what people were expecting; the Mosaic Law had established principles that justified retributive violence (much like in our own culture), condoning tit-for-tat responses to injustices. Jesus insists, however, that the Kingdom he came to establish was going to operate by different principles from anything they had experienced previously, and that the use of previously justified violence had no place in this new movement God was starting.

There's a widespread misconception that biblical literalism is facile and mindless, but the doctrine I was introduced to at Moody was every bit as complicated and arcane as Marxist theory or post-structuralism.... In many ways, Christian literalism is even more complicated than liberal brands of theology because it involves the sticky task of reconciling the overlay myth—the story of redemption—with a wildly inconsistent body of scripture. This requires consummate parsing of Old Testament commands, distinguishing between the universal (e.g., thou shalt not kill) from those particular to the Mosaic law that are no longer relevant after the death of Christ (e.g., a sexually violated woman must marry her rapist). It requires making the elaborate case that the Song of Solomon, a book of Hebrew erotica that managed to wangle its way into the canon, is a metaphor about Christ's love for the church, and that the starkly nihilistic book of Ecclesiastes is a representation of the hopelessness of life without God.

Heresy, in these remote days, always springs from a Jewish or Mosaic root. The false teachers are always teachers of the Law, advocating the Sabbath, circumcision, and other rites. But they do not teach only the Law, and are not to be confounded with the good scribes of Jerusalem, and their Pharisee disciples, absorbed in the canonical Law and its commentaries. They are real theologians, who taking advantage of the comparative indifference of their co-religionists to all but the worship of the Law, devote themselves to doctrinal speculation. And they did not stop there. To the already sufficiently minute observances of the Mosaic Law they added a very definite asceticism, celibacy, vegetarianism, and abstinence from wine. Those amongst them who accepted Christianity, combined with the new doctrines of the Gospel their "Jewish fables," and tried to impose them, together with their austere rule of life, upon new converts. They were, in fact, Judaizing gnostics, who in the primitive churches heralded the inroads of philosophic Gnosticism.

Final Cause is the reason, the interest in why you do what you do, your hope for how things turn out—how you imagine your best future. Final Cause is more than the goal of the goal—it’s the effectual living beyond the goal. Final Cause is the success after the success. Final Cause is the place where your time is spent on your values. Final Cause is where misaligned commitments are reexamined. Final Cause is purpose. Final Cause helps you integrate your purpose into everything you do—even before you’ve finished the puzzle to your big-picture dream. Puzzles are put together one piece at a time, not in one big block—and so are dreams. Final Cause helps you identify the big-picture dream, and Time Tipping helps you put together the oddly shaped interlocking pieces. The mosaic of our dreams draws closer as we draw the mosaic wide awake. Final Cause is your intangible expression of joyful living—that feeling of starting something new harmonizing with the fulfillment of accomplishment. To Time Tippers, Final Cause is not the end—it’s both the end and the beginning. The end informs the beginning so you can begin living the values of the end from the beginning.

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea's was anything very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to "find their feet" among them, while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

The Mosaic legend of the Fall of Man has preserved an ancient picture representing the origin and consequences of this disunion. The incidents of the legend form the basis of an essential article of the creed, the doctrine of original sin in man and his consequent need of succour. It may be well at the commencement of logic to examine the story which treats of the origin and the bearings of the very knowledge which logic has to discuss. For, though philosophy must not allow herself to be overawed by religion, or accept the position of existence on sufferance, she cannot afford to neglect these popular conceptions. The tales and allegories of religion, which have enjoyed for thousands of years the veneration of nations, are not to be set aside as antiquated even now. Upon a closer inspection of the story of the Fall we find, as was already said, that it exemplifies the universal bearings of knowledge upon the spiritual life. In its instinctive and natural stage, spiritual life wears the garb of innocence and confiding simplicity; but the very essence of spirit implies the absorption of this immediate condition in something higher. The spiritual is distinguished from the natural, and more especially from the animal, life, in the circumstance that it does not continue a mere stream of tendency, but sunders itself to self-realisation. But this position of severed life has in its turn to be suppressed, and the spirit has by its own act to win its way to concord again. The final concord then is spiritual; that is, the principle of restoration is found in thought, and thought only. The hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand which heals it. We are told in our story that Adam and Eve, the first human beings, the types of humanity, were placed in a garden, where grew a tree of life and a tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God, it is said, had forbidden them to eat of the fruit of this latter tree: of the tree of life for the present nothing further is said. These words evidently assume that man is not intended to seek knowledge, and ought to remain in the state of innocence. Other meditative races, it may be remarked, have held the same belief that the primitive state of mankind was one of innocence and harmony. Now all this is to a certain extent correct. The disunion that appears throughout humanity is not a condition to rest in. But it is a mistake to regard the natural and immediate harmony as the right state. The mind is not mere instinct: on the contrary, it essentially involves the tendency to reasoning and meditation. Childlike innocence no doubt has in it something fascinating and attractive: but only because it reminds us of what the spirit must win for itself. The harmoniousness of childhood is a gift from the hand of nature: the second harmony must spring from the labour and culture of the spirit. And so the words of Christ, ‘Except ye become as little children’, etc., are very far from telling us that we must always remain children. Again, we find in the narrative of Moses that the occasion which led man to leave his natural unity is attributed to solicitation from without. The serpent was the tempter. But the truth is, that the step into opposition, the awakening of consciousness, follows from the very nature of man; and the same history repeats itself in every son of Adam. The serpent represents likeness to God as consisting in the knowledge of good and evil: and it is just this knowledge in which man participates when he breaks with the unity of his instinctive being and eats of the forbidden fruit. The first reflection of awakened consciousness in men told them that they were naked. This is a naive and profound trait. For the sense of shame bears evidence to the separation of man from his natural and sensuous life. The beasts never get so far as this separation, and they feel no shame. And it is in the human feeling of shame that we are to seek the spiritual and moral origin origin of dress.

The rest, but a small part, is fiction, part of the mosaic of storytelling that a writer must employ to bring life to his tale. But as to which part is truth and which small part is fiction, I will leave that for you to decide.

As you pass from outer to inner narthex [in Istanbul’s Church of St. Savior], the doorway is crowned with a magnificent mosaic of Christ Pantokrator…. As in all such Eastern icons, frescoes, or mosaics of Christ, his right hand is raised in an authoritative teaching gesture, with his fingers separated into a twosome and a threesome to command Christian faith in the two natures of Christ and the three persons of the Trinity. As usual, he holds a book in his left hand. But he is not reading the book—it is not even open, but securely closed and tightly clasped. Christ does not read the Bible, the New Testament, or the Gospel. He is the norm of the Bible, the criterion of the New Testament, the incarnation of the Gospel. That is how we Christians decide between a violent and nonviolent God in the Bible, New Testament, or Gospel. The person, not the book, and the life, not the text, are decisive and constitutive for us.*

John Vernall lifted up his head, the milk locks that had given him his nickname stirring in the third floor winds, and stared with pale grey eyes out over Lambeth, over London. Snowy's dad had once explained to him and his young sister Thursa how by altering one's altitude, one's level on the upright axis of this seemingly three-planed existence, it was possible to catch a glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time. Or was at any rate, at least in Snowy's understanding of their father's Bedlam lectures, what most people saw as time from the perspective of a world impermanent and fragile, vanished into nothingness and made anew from nothing with each passing instant, all its substance disappeared into a past that was invisible from their new angle and which thus appeared no longer to be there. For the majority of people, Snowy realised, the previous hour was gone forever and the next did not exist yet. They-were trapped in their thin, moving pane of Now: a filmy membrane that might fatally disintegrate at any moment, stretched between two dreadful absences. This view of life and being as frail, flimsy things that were soon ended did not match in any way with Snowy Vernall's own, especially not from a glorious vantage like his current one, mucky nativity below and only reefs of hurtling cloud above. His increased elevation had proportionately shrunken and reduced the landscape, squashing down the buildings so that if he were by some means to rise higher still, he knew that all the houses, churches and hotels would be eventually compressed in only two dimensions, flattened to a street map or a plan, a smouldering mosaic where the roads and lanes were cobbled silver lines binding factory-black ceramic chips in a Miltonic tableau. From the roof-ridge where he perched, soles angled inwards gripping the damp tiles, the rolling Thames was motionless, a seam of iron amongst the city's dusty strata. He could see from here a river, not just shifting liquid in a stupefying volume. He could see the watercourse's history bound in its form, its snaking path of least resistance through a valley made by the collapse of a great chalk fault somewhere to the south behind him, white scarps crashing in white billows a few hundred feet uphill and a few million years ago. The bulge of Waterloo, off to his north, was simply where the slide of rock and mud had stopped and hardened, mammoth-trodden to a pasture where a thousand chimneys had eventually blossomed, tarry-throated tubeworms gathering around the warm miasma of the railway station. Snowy saw the thumbprint of a giant mathematic power, untold generations caught up in the magnet-pattern of its loops and whorls. On the loose-shoelace stream's far side was banked the scorched metropolis, its edifices rising floor by floor into a different kind of time, the more enduring continuity of architecture, markedly distinct from the clock-governed scurry of humanity occurring on the ground. In London's variously styled and weathered spires or bridges there were interrupted conversations with the dead, with Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans, their forgotten and obscure agendas told in stone. In celebrated landmarks Snowy heard the lonely, self-infatuated monologues of kings and queens, fraught with anxieties concerning their significance, lives squandered in pursuit of legacy, an optical illusion of the temporary world which they inhabited. The avenues and monuments he overlooked were barricades' against oblivion, ornate breastwork flung up to defer a future in which both the glorious structures and the memories of those who'd founded them did not exist.

Rainer Maria Rilke said, ‘The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.’ I will witness many crimes and commit my share of sins. I shall nonetheless rally from heart rendering defeat and continue struggling to make my mind a cool reflection table that is capable of mirroring without distress all the conflict and greed that living entails. I will rebound from glorious defeat of cherished ideas by continuing to exhibit profound reverence for every facet of living in a world filled with both kind and beastly people. I can never cease learning and working to control my devious monkey mind. While I prefer that other people respect me, I will encounter many people whom dislike or ignore me. I cannot live an enlightened existence attempting to win other people’s affection. I desire success, but I must embrace failure and heartache as the preeminent means to encounter suffering that is essential to foster intellectual and spiritual growth. I aspire to make a mosaic of the mind out of personal failures and script a future byline that is admirable because it reflects living in a principled and disciplined manner.

Self-identity depends upon our manner of apprehending the world. Life for me is primarily about distilling patterns, attempting to sift between the ordinary and extraordinary events of daily of life in order to weave a mosaic that defines and clarifies the reasons behind why and how I live.

The same thing could be said of the Bible as a whole. The crucifixion-resurrection, after all, isn’t just one event among many in the life of Jesus. It’s the event to which the whole Old Testament looks forward. From God’s making of animal-skin clothing for Adam and Eve, to the sacrificial system under the Mosaic Law, to the representative suffering of Israel’s king, to Isaiah’s prophecy of a Suffering Servant of the Lord, to Zechariah’s prophecy of a Stricken Shepherd, the Old Testament longs for its fulfillment in a King who would suffer, die, and triumph.

And how true it is that the turnings on the path are often so subtle, so unsuspected at the time, that we pass them by with a wave and a smile and a near arrogant ease. Yet when we look back in life the reasons for our choices seem unbearably flimsy and silly, which is confusing and even frightening. A totally different life which could have worked just as well as the one we have? That’s something none of us likes to think about. Instead, we try mightily to forget our other worlds that might have been, and with good reason. But all the same those rare and beautiful moments from the past live on within us, no farther away than the smell of an olive wood fire or the sound of rain beating softly on a garden, time’s unquiet ghosts, haunting our memories with secret whispers of what if? …

His thoughts came and went one at a time, without logical attachments or chains of causation, like hawks circling an empty sky. [...] And from their isolation, their profound disunity, he concluded that a mind was not something grown or evolved, but was a mosaic, a jackdaw’s nest of baubles and bits of glass between which lightning flickered now and again, connecting and establishing the whole for fractions of seconds, creating the illusion of a man, of a man’s rational and emotional convictions. Years before, months before, he might have denied this conception, put forward a romantic conception in its stead. But the constituency of his mind, his jackdaw’s nest, had changed, with war and prostitutes replacing home-cooking and girlfriends, and though a younger Mingolla would have rejected the bleakness of this self-knowledge, the current one found in it a source of strength, a justification for conscienceless action, for contempt of sentiment.

As we are in the Church age, which is an age of grace rather than the theocracy of Mosaic times, we are no longer under the Law as such. Dr. Geisler cogently summarizes these distinctions: “While the basic moral principles, reflective of God’s moral nature, embedded in the theocratic construct of Old Testament Israel, are the same immutable principles expressed in the context of grace for the New Testament church, nevertheless, church-age believers are not under Mosaic Law, which has been fulfilled and passed away.”73 I must briefly acknowledge that some theologians seem to disagree with this description of the relationship between the Law and the Gospel or the Law and grace, at least in a technical sense. Kaiser urges that we reject the idea that the Law ceases to be valid just because Jesus fulfilled its requirements for all believers. The Law itself is still valid, he claims, it’s just that we are empowered to obey it through faith. Kaiser is not arguing that we are saved by obeying the Law, as our salvation is purely from our faith in Christ and His finished work on the cross. He seems to be saying, however, that it still remains the perfect standard for holiness—and who can argue with that? He cites Paul, who asks, “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Romans 3:31).74 As I will discuss further in the next chapter in connection with the New Covenant, we can all acknowledge that God’s Law is perfect because its Maker is perfect. It was never intended, however, to impart life (Gal. 3:21).

By the time of the Mosaic covenant, the peace offering (Lev 17:11ff.) was the divinely prescribed means of maintaining a harmonious relationship between God and his covenant people. The sin offering (Lev 4) dealt with sin as a barrier between the worshipers and God. This sin offering was a slaughtered bull, lamb, or goat with which the worshiper had identified himself by laying his hands on its head. When the blood of the victim, signifying its life (Lev 17:11), was daubed on the horns of the altar, symbolizing the presence of God, God and the worshipers were united in a renewed relationship.

To all those smiles that makes a beautiful mosaic ❤️ adding beauty to life

Another survivor, Charlotte Delbo, describes her dual existence after Auschwitz: “[T]he ‘self’ who was in the camp isn’t me, isn’t the person who is here, opposite you. No, it’s too unbelievable. And everything that happened to this other ‘self,’ the one from Auschwitz, doesn’t touch me now, me, doesn’t concern me, so distinct are deep memory and common memory. . . . Without this split, I wouldn’t have been able to come back to life.”29 She comments that even words have a dual meaning: “Otherwise, someone [in the camps] who has been tormented by thirst for weeks would never again be able to say: ‘I’m thirsty. Let’s make a cup of tea.’ Thirst [after the war] has once more become a currently used term. On the other hand, if I dream of the thirst I felt in Birkenau [the extermination facilities in Auschwitz], I see myself as I was then, haggard, bereft of reason, tottering.”30 Langer hauntingly concludes, “Who can find a proper grave for such damaged mosaics of the mind, where they may rest in pieces? Life goes on, but in two temporal directions at once, the future unable to escape the grip of a memory laden with grief.”31

The mental Images were liquifying So I could no longer separate what I was recalling from the past from what I'd seen in detailed photos that afternoon. Like life. I've long suspected that many of my memories from childhood Are actually drawn from old pictures, That they are composed of snapshots, A mosaic of celluloids Images reworked into a remembered reality. Kodak cast backwards. Maybe it's better to recall The pass that way. We rarely take pictures of sad occasions.

Writing unearths the fragmentary remains of the years lived, to recover those out of a sense of pressing need for to build the loosely knit is not to fall apart in pieces but to form a mosaic that holds them all..

For the new covenant apostles, Jew-Gentile unity is pivotal to the early church. It is about more than human relational harmony. Instead, it acknowledges that God’s kingdom purposes are in Christ. He is the last man and the true Israel, the bearer of the Spirit. A Jewish person who clings to the tribal markings of the old covenant acts as though the eschaton has not arrived, as though one were still waiting for the promised seed. Both Jews and Gentiles must instead see their identities not in themselves or in the flesh but in Jesus Christ and in him alone. Jesus is the descendant of Abraham, the one who deserves the throne of David. He is the obedient Israel who inherits the blessings of the Mosaic covenant. He is the propitiation of God’s wrath. He is the firstborn from the dead, the resurrection and the life. Those who are in Christ – whether Jew or Gentile – receive with him all the eschatological blessings that are due to him. In him, they are all, whether Jew or Gentile, sons of God – not only in terms of relationship with the Father but also in terms of promised inheritance (Rom 8:12-17). In Christ, they all – whether Jew or Gentile – are sons of Abraham, the true circumcision, the holy nation, and the household and commonwealth of God (Gal 3:23-4:7; Eph 2-3; Col 2:6-15; 3:3-11; 1 Pet 2:9-10).…

That’s what I’ve taken from all this. The crash all those years ago shattered the life I had, but the pieces wound up making a pretty good mosaic. That’s what art is, I suppose: transforming things from what they were into what they could be. My life now, without question, is transformed. Maybe that makes it a work of art.

A forest floor, the Woodland villagers knew, is a living thing. Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another. It was here that you’d find the resourcefulness of rot, the wholeness of fungi. Disturbing these lives through digging was a violence—though sometimes a needed one, as demonstrated by the birds and white skunks who brashly kicked the humus away in necessary pursuit of a full belly. Still, the human residents of this place were judicious about what constituted actual necessity, and as such, disturbed the ground as little as possible.

All the pieces in my life will get rearranged into something new like the tiles of a mosaic. I never thought that from those pieces I might be able to choose something different. Something that's mine. But I can - I will." -Emma

Maybe this is simply what living is: an infinite list of transgressions that did not weigh against the joys but that simply overlaid them, the two lists mingling and merging, all the small moments that made up the mosaic of a person, a relationship, a life.

In place of polytheistic idolatry, a new pattern of worship was ordained by God in the Mosaic Law. One of its key components was a purified form of sacrifice. Although recognizable as the same ritual practiced by other cultures, it was stripped of all their sinful distortions and regulated so that it might fulfill its natural purpose: drawing humanity into relationship with God. It was a perfected form of sacrifice.

Maybe, she thinks, this is simply what living is: an infinite list of transgressions that did not weigh against the joys but that simply overlaid them, the two lists mingling and merging, all the small moments that made up the mosaic of a person, a relationship, a life. What Bird will learn, then: That his mother is fallible. That she is only human, too.

Behind every person is a story, a collection of moments that shape the contours of their existence. It's a narrative woven with threads of joy and sorrow, painted with strokes of laughter and tears. Each individual carries within them a unique history, a composition of experiences that define who they are. Beyond the surface, there are layers of emotions, a complex interplay of happiness, pain, and everything in between. It's a journey marked by footprints of relationships, imprints of challenges, and echoes of accomplishments. Behind every person is a living novel, a mosaic of memories, and a reflection of the intricate dance between resilience and vulnerability. So, in the weave of life, let's explore the myriad stories that make each person extraordinary and incomprehensibly beautiful.

Key Themes All people are sinners and need to be saved from their sin (1:18–3:20; 5:12–19). The Mosaic law is good and holy, but only Christ can remove sin and overcome its power (2:12–29; 3:9–20; 5:20; 7:1–25; 9:30–10:8). Through the righteousness of God, sin is judged and salvation is provided (3:21–26; 5:12–19; 6:1–10; 7:1–6; 8:1–4). With the coming of Jesus Christ, a new age of redemptive history has begun (1:1–7; 3:21–26; 5:1–8:39). The atoning death of Jesus Christ is central to God’s plan of salvation (3:21–26; 4:23–25; 5:6–11, 15–19; 6:1–10; 7:4–6; 8:1–4). Justification is by faith alone (1:16–4:25; 9:30–10:21). Those who are in Christ Jesus have a sure hope of future glory (5:1–8:39). By the power of the Holy Spirit, those who have died with Christ live a new life (2:25–29; 6:1–7:6; 8:1–39). God is sovereign in salvation. He works all things according to his plan (9:1–11:36). God fulfills his promises to both Jews and Gentiles (1:18–4:25; 9:1–11:36; 14:1–15:13). Because of God’s grace, Christians should be morally pure, should show love to their neighbors, should be good citizens, and should welcome their fellow believers into fullest fellowship (12:1–15:7).

Third, whereas the Mosaic covenant was temporary (vv. 10–11; see Gal 3:23–25), the new covenant endures forever (v. 11). A key verb in this passage and the following verses is katargeō (vv. 7, 11, 13, 14—all in the passive voice). Although many translations, including the NAB, render katargeō as “fade” in verses 7, 11, and 13, this meaning does not correspond to Paul’s usage elsewhere. Rather, he uses this verb to explain that the old covenant ministry “has been set aside” or “rendered inoperative.”[14] Because God has now acted once for all through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and through the sending of the Spirit, the new covenant ministry is marked by permanence.