Bekezela Mtanami: for my kids...hold on to the faith, be as bold as uBejane!!!
Not even Solomon
Ik Heft mijn oge op: Spitzkoppe
Mukurob, Gods finger close to Asab that collapsed 7 December 1988. Our family was at the site six months before and six months after the collapse. A magnificent testimony to the flood and God's infinite creativity.
Grevys Zebra, for Andre Kunz.
Amatobo: The Bald heads painted for "Twista" Frik de Beer.
Gorongoza pachyderms, painted for the Dawson family. In gratitude, reflecting the good years of friendship in Mozambique.
"The love that matters is His for you—yours for Him may at present exist only in the form of obedience. He will see to the rest." CS Lewis.
If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self- denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
For Daniel de Beer.
Wealth
Milele Rev.5v5 : Gift for The Galarato family
Alpha : A Gift to Jemma de Beer
Injathi for Gloria de Beer
Rudini: A Gift for Kavana
Lindanda.
kwa Zulu
Msasa dawn, Zimbabwe declares ... A gift to the Reekers family
From The Weight of Glory
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
I once had a phenomenal privilege of leading young students into the bush around Maputo looking for all kinds of life, in a citizen science project to document fauna and flora for the Animal Demographic unit in Cape Town. That was where I encountered the mind bending Stropanthus flower.
Gould and Lewontin wrote in " The Spandrels of san Marco and the panglossian paradigm: a ctitique of the adaptationist programme" (1979) that not every trait is an adaptation. How insightful and true! Certain characteristics may be considered decorative like a spandrel, but then some like the petals on this flower go way beyond decoration to declaration.
In the cathedral of san Marco there are also "Lunettes" - Half moon recesses that serve to remind us of historical events, like the power of God in his creative action. "For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse".Romans1 v 20. Stropanthus declares that there is a God and that the heavens (and earth) ..declare His glory!
Linden star, the Leopard painting created for Jemma deBeer's upcoming book " Quest for Paradise"Available on Amazon in June 2021. (Lord willing)
Disa Dawn: Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
From The Problem of Pain
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
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