Small Town Summer

What do you do when you realize old-fashioned doughnuts are the best?

You eat them.

It is the first week of summer vacation, and I’ve begun a terrible and beautiful habit. This past winter, a little cafe opened downtown. It’s so little that there are only three tables inside and two tables outside. They serve sandwiches and other things, but I go for the doughnuts. I’ve tried a few kinds: old-fashioned plain, maple-bacon (wow, sugar blast!), and a sort of puff-doughnut. But the one I keep coming back to is the old-fashioned cinnamon-sugar.

Yesterday morning, I walked down Main Street in the sun. I was alone, so I carried my journal, and I thought about all the times I’ve walked down that street growing up. I looked down the brand new development that’s engulfed my old woods, and I took a deep breath. Things change, I told myself, and who knows? Maybe those houses will be filled with children who discover life like I did, even if their woods will be a different shape.

I passed the street where dear family friends live, with memories of Man Hunt and swimming and screaming in fun. I passed the Richdale, notorious for its ugliness in our sweet town (and where I routinely purchased Snickers and Coke growing up). Past the graveyard and the old church I used to go to. Past the white house whose kids I still think of as tiny but who graduated this past spring. I hit the cafe faster than I thought and was a little dismayed to find one of the tables outside surrounded by three boisterous women (one of whom I used to know) – how was I supposed to write?!

Doughnut and iced coffee in hand, I sat down and took out my journal. I broke off pieces of doughnut, the kind with crispy edges and fluffy insides, and I thought about how a stranger had said to me recently, “Your hometown’s all backroads – no offense!” and I had looked at her quizzically and said, “Why would I take offense? That’s what I like.”, and it was uncomfortable, but only for me because she wasn’t aware enough to know what I thought of her.

I sipped my coffee and listened to the women pronounce “Elaina” like “Elainer,” “Linda” like “Linder,” and even though a part of me cringes at this botching of a beautiful sound, I secretly enjoy hearing it. I wondered if I would run into Eric of the white beard and full laugh and David of the middle-aged sweet arrogance and too-many-margaritas again. The week before they’d been sitting at the table next to me, their National Grid vans parked on the street, and we had been far too close to each other not to say hello. “Hello” turned into a twenty minute conversation.

[“We’re here every day!” they said. “We’ll be seeing you this summer!”]

I wrote and watched for about an hour, and I packed up only when I begrudgingly admitted I had ESL lesson plans to write. As I threw out my trash and headed to the sidewalk, a National Grid van drove by, and Eric’s white beard shown in the sun. He waved a big wave and said, “Catherine!”, and I smiled.

There is an ease to small-town living that I don’t know if I could live without.

Faces and Illuminated Manuscripts

I wander into the throng of people, past the long table covered in delicious-looking food, and into the gallery. I haven’t been in this building in nearly two years; the tile floors and walls of windows remind me of creative writing classes and theatre monologues and my first interview for college admission.

Now I’m twenty-four years old and attending the senior project of a fellow lit-journal friend. I’m not sure who I’ll run into, who will glance at me from across the room and smile (or not smile). I rarely like to read about the projects first – the words get all tied up in my mind and crowd out what my eyes are seeing – so I skip ahead and look at the repetition of trees and brick building edges. In the center is a dark, tiny room, with illuminated manuscripts meticulously created. Candles flicker, and I want to reach out and touch despite the “Please Do Not Touch” sign.

I know it’s hers when I see the faces, familiar faces that I can’t put names to. The oil paintings watch us as we gaze, and I’m shocked at the enormity of time and material and space this takes up.

[My senior thesis was “Poetry and Music”, a mere hour and ten minutes of my hardest and best and most exhausting work. English, German, Italian : aria, song, jazz. That was two years ago.]

I know why I’ve come when I run into an old professor, a man who sat across from me in a Salzburg coffee shop and didn’t have to pretend he was interested in our conversation. We stand talking, he, his wife, another art professor, and I.

Teaching Latin at a Christian school. Love it.

What’s next?

THIS. or THIS. or THIS.

You’ve got the moxie for that.

And even though I’ve never heard the word “moxie” other than soda, I know what it means, and I smile.

So it can be done! You did it – taught and created and studied – and now look at you! Yes.

My fear of being the one who “had so much potential” but never quite cut it ebbs as I see the lack of concern in their eyes.

We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

– “Blue House” by Tomas Transtromer

Pure Poetry

Dylan was the word-maddest of word-mad young poets.

Often the best poems happen when lines cross; when poets write in pursuit of the spirit while their words still roar with years of obsession and love.

Dylan never put his poetry in service to anything but poetry. He served the Muse; he wrote pure poetry. But what is pure poetry pure of? It is pure of thought and pure of feeling, pure of vision; its largest emotion is love for itself.

So goes Donald Hall’s essay on Dylan Thomas in Their Ancient Glittering Eyes. I am simultaneously awed and disgusted; what is it about those who reach the edge of acceptable and choose to jump that will always get my admiration? I cannot respect because I cannot agree, but these lines are still there, the beautiful creation of a life despicably lived:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

  The night above the dingle starry,

               Time let me hail and climb

      Golden in the heydays of his eyes

I am attempting the impossible: to live well and create well. To write poetry that serves more than itself but that refuses to be merely therapy.

[A friend asked me my senior year of college, “What is the fault of bad poetry?”, and I said as I hurried across the grassy quad, “Sentimentality.” I know some of the answers.]

Words as words and words as art – to use them well but not join the ranks of Plath and Sexton and all the rest. To learn poetry as another way, but maybe not the only way.

[“Fern Hill”]

Update

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1. Spring is springing. Finally. I will update the “View From My Window” picture soon so I can prove it.

2. The musical is over and it was beautiful. I keep attempting to write about it, but it deserves more time and thought than I’ve been able to give it. Expect a post soon, though, filled with quotes from darling children and an extremely proud director.

3. Went bee-ing for the first time this year. Sunday afternoon was spent in a smoke-and-propolis-filled jeep, bumping over bumpy gravel roads to get to the hives. (Propolis is a dark golden cement that bees use to hold their hives together – very strong stuff!) We checked on three hives and fed them. Oh, and we found a mouse nest (yes! a mouse nest!) in the base of one of the hives. Confusing, because Dad had put up a mouse guard, but the little buggers climbed in through the opening. It was filled with cotton-looking stuff, deer hair, and a bunch of cozy mouse things. Not good. Dad said, “Where’s the blogger’s camera?”, and I just shook my head; some things are better described than seen.

4. Did not get into the MFA programs. Am I shocked? Not really. I tucked the rejection letter in my briefcase of correspondences for the day when I will look at it and laugh. I’m not laughing right now, but I hope it’s coming.

5. Last week before April vacation!!! Can you tell I’m psyched? But I can’t imagine how hard it’ll be to motivate my seniors when we get back…ugh…

6. Finally figured out the email subscription thingy. All it took was, “Um, Harry? Will you help me?” and with one simple click he changed the entire thing. Embarrassing. So if you’d like to be notified via email of new posts, sign up! It should finally be working!

7. Listening incessantly to: The Shins Pandora Station. Love.

Have a wonderful Monday!

A Past Worth Preserving

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I wrote my great-grandmother’s “biography” when I was nine or ten. It was terrible. It all started because I had a magazine, and I wanted to interview her for the “Premier Edition.” (My aunt had worked for a magazine for a few years after college, hence the language.) I took a yellow legal pad and a blue pen and sat across from my great-grandmother in my dead great-grandfather’s blue recliner. The sun shone hot through the bay window, and I remember feeling pretty grown-up, asking all these questions. I had a legal pad, after all.

I asked her about growing up in the early 1900s. I asked her what she did for fun, what school was like, what her home was like filled with six people. I asked her how her hometown was different during WWI than it is now, and I asked her what she liked to eat and how she met my great-grandfather. I wrote furiously because I didn’t want to miss a word and the thought of writing shorthand never occurred to me. My great-grandmother’s handwriting was always beautiful – smooth and looped – and mine was hurried and uneven and merely served a purpose.

I think I was in awe of the sheer amount of time sitting across from me. Born in 1909, my grandmother had seen both World Wars and all the other atrocities and beauties of the 20th century. I crafted the interview with all the intensity of a ten-year-old who wanted desperately to preserve the past, and a copy of that old magazine is tucked away in my great-grandfather’s briefcase where I keep all my old creations.

I’d forgotten about the interview and the resulting mini-biography until this morning. For Christmas my mother bought me a book by Donald Hall, the former poet laureate: String Too Short to be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm. It’s a thin paperback, first published in 1961, and it has a poet’s carefulness of language and transcendent moments.

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Hall writes of his grandparents’ farm and the summers he spent living and working alongside them. He writes of moments in the hayfield when all he ever wanted was to hay, and of a time when he was so exhausted and thirsty from picking blueberries that he couldn’t imagine his 70-year-old grandfather was still plugging away, stripping the low-growing bushes of their tiny wild berries. The love Hall felt for his grandparents and the place is so palpable, it made me fall in love with them myself. His poetry was born in the fields of New Hampshire.

Hall says he had a “need to conserve the past,” and I know that is what I felt sitting across from my great-grandmother, desperate to grasp this other life that I would never know.

It seemed abominable to me that I had only one life to live, and that the realities and hardships and loveliness of this woman’s life would be lost to nothingness when she died.

I don’t think she herself felt such a desperation.

During college, Hall found himself longing for his friends during the lonely summers in New Hampshire. He doesn’t hide the horrible guilt he felt, and I knew exactly what he was talking about; the deep love you have, yet the desire for something stirring inside you.

The book ends as I knew it would. His grandfather dies when Hall is 24, and even though that is the way of every life, I cried. I haven’t cried at a book in a good long time, and I was surprised and glad that no one was around. How can you explain crying over someone else’s dead grandfather? Someone who’d lived a good life and worked hard and loved well?

I think I was struck as much by the beauty as the sadness. There was such strength in the life of this man I will never know, this grandfather who had shaped a young boy more than he realized. I saw the sweet progression of life, the stories of family and friends and small-town myths all woven together. It was not mysterious. It was not filled with world-travel or adventures or death-defying heroic acts. The adventures and heroic acts were contained in the fields of generations of farmers, and they breathe in the pages of this book.

My great-grandmother’s life is much the same way. She grew up and lived in the same city until she was 95 and moved in with my aunt and uncle. She didn’t go to college, but she loved words and music and games. She had four grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and she made lemon meringue pie and cole slaw for every family dinner. She went to Niagara Falls and took pictures and she attended the same church her entire life.

What is this desire to preserve the past? In some ways it feels like an avoidance. I am constantly living in the past or the future, my eyes set both forwards and back. I hold on to my great-grandmother and my grandmother’s words tightly, as if they hold some secret to a better time. How do I get that? I wonder. How do I get stories? How do I live? I don’t think either one of these women ever really thought about that; living was what you did, not what you thought about.

I am striving to live some huge life, some remarkable, adventurous life. I’m wondering if I have my priorities straight. Maybe a past worth preserving doesn’t have to be of legendary proportions; maybe it has to be true.

Summer 2008 016The summer after I graduated high school – all six of us kids on our yearly vacation.

The Sibling Police [Thanks for Being There]

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“Isn’t it kind of scary that people you don’t know read your blog?”

This question always comes from people who don’t write.

I thought I would be a writer when I was two years old. I’m not even exaggerating. I remember one day in the apartment before we’d moved to our house, and I wanted to write a letter. I didn’t know how to spell anything, so I ran out to the living room and asked my mother how to spell “Dear Gramma.” I wrote letter after letter of the same sentences: “Dear Gramma, I love you and God loves you too. Love, Catherine.” A little redundant, huh? But that’s the day I remember thinking something along the lines of I want to write books because books were some of my best friends. (Don’t get me wrong, I was extremely social. Don’t imagine me all reclusive and lonely in a diaper.)

It’s because I’ve always hoped to write that I’m not too worried about others reading my work. It’s a natural result of writing. It’s what we all hope will happen one day.

I am not worried about people I don’t know reading my blog. I’m worried about people I love reading it.

I was thinking of writing a post about my selfishness and my strivings for graciousness and self-sacrifice and gratitude. And then I imagined my brothers and sister reading it, and all the hubbub that would’ve caused: “Um, excuse me, but didn’t you just write about being more giving? I could really use xyz right now…” And then I laughed because I realized I don’t want anyone keeping tabs on my soul-work but me. I guess God can be in on it, but even that’s a little dicey sometimes (I half-kid).

The idea of “live and let live” has never crossed my family’s mind, at least not my siblings and me. My parents are much better at stepping back and watching us screw up (not in a ‘haha!’ way, just a good, healthy, you-are-adults-now way). The four of us, on the other hand, are constantly giving our two or three or four cents-worth and then raging when our obviously-correct advice goes unheeded. I am by far the worst culprit, but the other three are fast at my heels.

It isn’t my words that make me feel vulnerable, it’s the implications those words have on my life that make me (and any writer) easier to critique.

That’s the trade-off, though. To hold everything inside because someone might discover I’m not nearly as good at doing what I strive to do as I am at claiming the coffee as “mine!” and the bathroom as “mine!” and the warmest winter coat in the house as “mine!”. This is not an option.

So when people ask me if I’m nervous about strangers reading my blog, I’ll just smile and say, “I’m honored when strangers read my blog. I’m terrified when people I know read it.”

Note to the Siblings: I am NOT working on graciousness today, FYI.

6 Steps to Getting Catherine to Apply to Grad School

1. Remind her how much she loves writing. And tell her often, because children and Latin and studying and even good movies can get in the way.

2. Let her know the possibilities it would open up. College professor (because yes, an MFA is a terminal degree). Literary Journal editor (because that would be a lot more engaging than book publishing). Networking (because this is the 21st century and it’s all about who you know).

3. Give her an encouraging and challenging writers’ group. Fill it with smart-thinking, intelligent, well-read people. Make sure they don’t let her get away with anything. Especially heavy-handed sentimentalism.

4. Remind her that she sifts through life with writer’s eyes. This is kind of vital. She’s a singer too, definitely, but it’s with a writer’s mind that she experiences life. Stories. It’s stories that she sings and stories that she writes.

5. Give her professors who care enough to grab coffee and chat. Even after graduation. These people will be vital to making it all feel possible.

6. And parents who think she has something worth sharing. It all started with this one.

March 1st. It came a little too quickly.

I sat staring at the screen until I realized: I could do this forever. Til I die. I would never be satisfied with this application.

So I printed them out, ten whole poems that each were a different part of me. I wrote a personal essay on why I write, why I want to get my Master of Fine Arts, and what I need to learn. I wrote a critical essay dissecting a poem that I have loved dearly since high school (and, consequently, it has come to mean many different things over the years). I ran out during break, over-nighted the hefty sucker, and went back to finish teaching. I was pleased with how easily I fit right back in; I barely thought about the fact that I COULD NOT MAKE ONE MORE CHANGE – it was all done.

Now it’s all about waiting. A few more weeks, they tell me. What if I don’t get in?

Well, there’s plenty of room for assuming I won’t. These are pretty competitive programs, and the thing about all this is yes, it is about talent and ability, but it’s a lot about luck too. Who’s reading my stuff? Will it resonate with that particular person? Cause if not, it’s in the rejection pile I go.

If I don’t get in, I’ll be fine. Probably start a Master’s in Education. Keep teaching Latin. One of the reasons I’m glad I waited a year to apply is that I feel like I’m approaching it with a little more level-headedness; I either get in or I don’t. The only control I had was in preparing the best possible material, and I always have the option of:

Try again next year.

The Writing Life [and its many components]

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The feeling I get standing in the wings, waiting to walk out on stage.

The scratchy grass on my back, the sun too bright in my eyes, and the smell of the earth baking.

Singing “Caput, umeri, genua, pedes” (“head, shoulders, knees, and toes”…or feet, technically) til I feel like I’ve gotten my workout for the day.

Digging in the cold, icy earth first thing in the spring. Clearing away old brush. Seeing nothing but gray-brown until one sunny morning green shoots magically appear.

The moment I scan through the mail and see in beautiful or messy or barely-there handwriting my name and address. Opening a letter that’s traveled from Pennsylvania or Maine or Switzerland. Remembering that geography isn’t strong enough to destroy good friendships.

The ocean, cold and thick with seaweeds. The feeling of rough sand on my feet, when I can barely see because the wind is whipping my hair in my face. The long stretches of days when for a moment I truly think it will never end.

When I walk around the corner at a museum and come upon a life-size sculpture. The lines of the body, the artistry in the way the cloak is draped across the torso, the way the sculpture seems to be breathing right there in front of me.

Explaining the word “etymology” to a too-young class because they’re too excited to wait. Opening their minds up to the beauty of language and the world ahead of them.

The way I feel when I’m surrounded by people I love. Maybe at my house, maybe at a dark cozy restaurant, maybe at a beach house or church or the lake.

~     ~     ~

I don’t think it’s possible to be a writer and love only writing.

Last summer, I wrote a post about my plans to write when I was at the beach for a week. I foolishly anticipated long stretches of time when I would be able to read and write to my heart’s content. What I forgot to factor in was people: the people who make everything worth it. Who can turn down a four-hand cribbage game with the Gram, a brother, and a cousin? Who can stay cozied up on a beach chair while everyone else goes for a long ambling walk along the ocean? Who asks a room-full of family to “Please stop singing along to the record player because I’m trying to write?”

Some people probably do, but this girl finds it pretty difficult.

Writing is a solitary act in so many ways. Right now, I’m sitting at my kitchen table, waiting for the water to boil so I can fill my french press. I’m alone, and that’s okay for now. In fact, it’s rather nice. In the long term, though? Not so much fun.

Maybe there is a writer out there who loathes people. Maybe he sits at his desk for ten hours a day and throws his hands up in gratitude that he never has to interact with anyone. Maybe he doesn’t like music or art or the outdoors or any of the other beautiful things of life.

I don’t think I’d really connect with whatever he wrote.

~     ~     ~

I had a long talk with a friend from college. He was asking what I was up to, what life looked like lately. I told him about teaching Latin (“You wouldn’t believe it! When I teach them derivatives it’s like they cannot believe ‘manipulate’ comes from manus and they freak out.” Granted, this is only my younger grades. My high schoolers are a little less enthused.), directing Alice in Wonderland (“Do you know what it’s like to have those songs stuck in your head ALL THE TIME?”), and applying to MFA programs (Um, scared.). It was in talking with him that I remembered one of the best parts of being a writer: Everything I do will add to it.

I came across this woman from Colorado. We’d actually met briefly four or five years ago, but I found her because of Twitter (that all-too-kind-suggester thought we should be friends). We’ve been writing back and forth, and she was telling me about applying to grad school – but in history, not writing. What is history if not stories? What is music if not stories in sound? And what is good conversation if not a sharing of our personal plot lines?

Being a writer is like having the biggest job description ever.

Do I make my money from writing?

Not yet.

But writing makes you look at the world and your life in a different way. It makes you more attuned to the little things, and it reminds you that sharing those experiences and being able to reproduce a moment of truth for someone else is your job.

[Over-nighted my last MFA application. Any nervousness I would’ve felt was nervoused-away in the days leading up to it. I popped it in the mail between Latin classes, and I’m currently attempting to pretend to forget.]

Writing (and reading) connect us to each other. Just as I met Anne who’s going to study history, I can write about any of those things and someone in the middle of South Dakota or Canada or the United Kingdom probably loves them too. It’s all part of living the Full Life, like I tried weakly to express in an earlier post. It’s one of those constant discoveries I keep discovering.

Do I regret going for walks at the beach? Playing cribbage and screaming during games of Taboo? Do I wish I’d really committed and sat down and written line after line of poetry or what-have-you? No way.

[Weekend Thoughts]

How do you know when you’ve read a book that’s changed your life?

You want to give a copy to all of your friends.

Unfortunately, that isn’t financially feasible for me at the moment, but here’s a shameless plug for a book that’s probably out of print (and therefore deliciously difficult to find among wobbly stacks at little used bookstores):

“Decision Making by the Book” by Haddon Robinson.

Ignore, if you can, the horrendous title and the equally ugly book jacket, because let me tell you, IT’S WORTH IT. The whole time I was reading, I thought of moments in my life when I wish I’d already had this sucker in my back pocket.

What if “What’s God’s will in this situation?” isn’t even the right question to ask?

What if “How can I glorify God?’ is a much better one?

I wish I could force my friends to read it, but my powers are only so strong.

~     ~     ~

Went to a museum Saturday with my city-friend. We got lost on the way (Surprise! I stink at directions!), but we didn’t panic, which is a vast improvement and I think shows that we’re maturing. They asked if I were a student, and for a second I thought, Yes, and then I realized, No, and had to pay the entrance fee. No photography was allowed, but we furtively snapped some photos of the cool bathroom. So retro.

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~     ~     ~

This afternoon, I went to a coffee shop to get work done, found a too-tiny table without a plug nearby, and plunked down, hoping to get at least some of it finished. Sent some emails about the musical (Alice in Wonderland, Jr., by the way!), and was able to just start writing my midterm exam for Latin I when WHAM! my computer died. So sad. But I thought I’d truck on, using good old pen and paper, when a girl’s tiny voice rose above the din and said, “Just so you all know, we will be closing at 3:00.” She paused. “That’s in two minutes.”

Oh well.

Headed home, made some Genmaicha tea, sat down to finish writing the midterm…and started writing this blogpost instead.

So now, according to the bizarre countdown on pbs.org, I have roughly 3 hours and 31 minutes until “Downton Abbey” starts. Can I finish the test?!?! We shall see.

Advent and Narrative

My Advent-morning ritual is elongated today. All the fifth and sixth graders are off on various field trips, leaving me with only my high school class before noon. The coffee’s steeping (brewing? I know what we say for tea, but what does coffee do in a French press?!), candles are burning, and the tree is lit. Attempting for a moment to slow down and think.

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A friend told me the other day that she’s afraid of blogging because of how personal it is. She’s written a few posts (to which I am privy), but she said she felt hindered because she didn’t want people to know things about her. [this is where I’m tempted to post a link to her blog, but I’d rather not die today]

She’s right, though. There is this strange reality that I haven’t really dealt with yet: personal histories being read by strangers.

Growing up, I was intensely private. I remember having a crush on one of the boys in town, and I didn’t tell a living soul. My sister begged me, pleaded, said she didn’t understand why I didn’t trust her. But there was no way I was letting anyone in on that secret part of my life. I thought it was foolish to open up to people, because you never knew when they would use that information against you. (I guess I was a cynical nine-year-old…)

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Things have changed in the last decade or more. I think college had a lot to do with it. Living in such close proximity with peers, getting to know the ins and outs of roommates, friends, classmates, sometimes to the point of really not wanting to know ANYMORE. (I’m just kidding, guys. Bring me your woes, your fears, your strivings!) I came in as a freshman with no desire to open myself to the possibilities.

I was scared.

But I’ve realized that there isn’t much more to life than opening up to the possibilities. Isn’t that what God asks of us? Open yourself up to the possibility of being loved. Open yourself up to knowing Me. Open yourself up to the fullness of My blessings.

~     ~     ~

The best literature is honest. The best writing is the writing that gets at the core of it. I’ve read a lot of good writing, but the stuff that sticks in my mind, the words that have burned themselves into my consciousness, are the ones that spoke from the writer’s soul. That is what connects us.

I’m reading Wild, a memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. The author, Cheryl Strayed, gets lost and attempts to find out where she is by using the graphs and maps and calculations in her guidebook. It doesn’t work. She’s not very mathematical: “I see things in narrative,” she says.

While I certainly value math and science, and even enjoy them sometimes, I come from Strayed’s view. I see things in narrative. I look back on the things that have happened in my life, the people I have known, and I see stories.

Now, blogging may not be for my friend. It does require a certain openness, a certain letting-go of oneself. I told her there were many ways to blog – to write. If she’d rather stick with the less-personal, she should!

But the stories are what connect us. They are what show us the brokenness in each other, but they are also what deliver salvation.

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Isaiah 9:6 

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