Theo and C examine a toy: At friend C’s fourth birthday party at Estell Manor Park.
QUOTE: “Friends frequently wrote of being humbled by the Spirit, or that their hearts were made tender. While being humbled can be part of one’s individual transformation, it was also something that was experienced as a community. Friends frequently wrote of being humbled, tendered, or brought low, sometimes accompanied by tears.”
"Therefore take heed of the fleshly wisdom; take heed of thine own understanding; take heed of thy reasoning or disputing; for these are the weapons wherewith the witness is slain. That wisdom must be destroyed, and that understanding brought to naught, and thou become a child, and learn as a child if ever thou know the things of God."
Isaac Penington, 1617-1679, early convert to Friends, in The Inward Journey of Isaac Penington (Robert Leach, 1943), p. 6.
Comment: did you ever read something and have that eerie feeling the writer is speaking directly to you? One reason I love old Quaker writings are because I often feel a close kinship, as if they’re the mentors too often lacking in my real life.
"The beginning of this religion, of this power and holy inward covenant, is sweet; but the pure progress and going on of it much more pleasant, as the lord gives to feel the growth and sweet living freshness of it; notwithstanding the temptations, fears, troubles, trials, oppositions, and great dangers, both within and without,… all its ways are pleasantness, and its paths peace; yea, the very yoke is easy and the burden light, when the mind and will is changed by the power, and helped and assisted by the lord in its subjection to the power."
