What journal do you use for your morning journaling?

This question came often from this recent post; sorry not to include the info originally. I use this one. It has large pages (8.75″ x 12.5 “), lays flat, and has 235 pages. I try to fill a page most mornings, even when I’m in a rush or feel like I don’t have anything to say (that’s where the prompts help). Missing some days, however, it takes me almost a year to fill this up. I have a stack of completed ones.

You think you are spiritual, so why do you relish the material senses so much, like the beauty of nature and delicious food?

These things only hint at the glory of God’s substance, but I’ll rejoice in the hints wherever I find them.

Here are some quotes from Mary Baker Eddy on this subject:

“To take all earth’s beauty into one gulp of vacuity and label beauty nothing, is ignorantly to caricature God’s creation, which is unjust to human sense and to the divine realism. In our immature sense of spiritual things, let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: “I love your promise; and shall know, some time, the spiritual reality and substance of form, light, and color, of what I now through you discern dimly; and knowing this, I shall be satisfied.”
(Miscellaneous Writings p. 87)

“Enjoying good things is not evil, but becoming slaves to pleasure is.”
(The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany,  p. 197)

“Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul.”
(Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 269)

To me, God is supreme good itself, and good is to be rejoiced in wherever found, as pointing to an idea of ultimate good. I believe there is absolute, spiritual good behind anything perceived as humanly good. So yes, I enjoy good wherever I experience it, as stemming from its divinely spiritual Source, and this blog attempts to amplify that good.

Since I try to see as God sees, instead with the finite senses, I do avoid the types of imbibing that tend to enslave and obfuscate, like alcohol, caffeine, etc.

Notably, however, it is when seeing error, evil, limitation, or lack, that I distrust what the material senses are saying, and turn my thought to focus what God, good, is doing instead.

What are your top fifteen favorite novels?

Hummm, this list might be different every time I attempt it, but here goes, in no order, with links:

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doer

Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Heidi by Johanna Spyri

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Girl of the Limberlost by Jean Stratton-Porter

Joseph by Terri Fivash

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kid

The Art Forger by B. A. Shapiro

The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

The Robe by Lloyd Douglas

So Big by Edna Ferber

Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Overstory by Richard Powers