Amazing Grace by John Newton

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace those fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believed!

Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail
And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who called me here below,
Will be forever mine.

John Newton Anglican clergyman and hymn writer was born in London (1725). His father was a ship's captain, and his pious mother died when he was seven years old, so he accompanied his father to sea. He once tried to desert the Royal Navy, and was publicly flogged and demoted. Later, another ship traded him as cargo, and he became the servant of an African slave dealer. He ended up a captain and carried slaves between Europe, the sugar plantations of the West Indies, and Africa's slave coast.

In 1748, he had a spiritual conversion on a journey back to England. He almost drowned in a terrible storm, but he prayed to God, and the ship did not sink. After that, he stopped gambling and drinking, and he married a girl he had loved for many years.

Newton was ordained as a minister. He gave up the slave trade entirely, and later in his life he became an outspoken abolitionist. In his best-selling pamphlet Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade (1788), he described the awful conditions of the slave ships he had captained. By this time, Newton was a well-known preacher and writer of hymns, and the public listened to him. In 1805, the 80-year-old Newton went completely blind, but he didn't stop working. The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in March of 1807; Newton died that December. He is best remembered for his hymns, which include "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken," "How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds," and "Amazing Grace," the poem selection for today.

Family Stories by Dorianne Laux 1952-

Family Stories


I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family,
how an argument once ended when his father
seized a lit birthday cake in both hands
and hurled it out a second-story window. That,
I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger
sent out across the sill, landing like a gift
to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine
it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus,
and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed
the people in his stories really loved one another,
even when they yelled and shoved their feet
through cabinet doors, or held a chair like a bottle
of cheap champagne, christening the wall,
rungs exploding from their holes.
I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury
of the passionate. He said it was a curse
being born Italian and Catholic and when he
looked from that window what he saw was the moment
rudely crushed. But all I could see was a gorgeous
three-layer cake gliding like a battered ship
down the sidewalk, the smoking candles broken, sunk
deep in the icing, a few still burning.


Dorianne Laux (born January 10, 1952 Augusta, Maine) is an American poet. Laux worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, and a maid before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988. Laux taught at the University of Oregon. She is a professor at North Carolina State University’s creative writing program, and the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University. Laux lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband, poet Joseph Millar and has a daughter.[citation needed] [edit

Word of the day

1.	skid row
	1. a place of where people go after hitting rock bottom 2. a place where the destitute and underlings of society gather. 3. jail Joey was found in skid row after losing his job, wife, and home thanks to the greedy corporation that laid him off.
2.	skid row
	"Skidding" refers to the method of moving logs/timbers by dragging them along the ground. Before the age of trucks and the internal combustion engine Skidding was done by teams of horses/mules/oxen driven by burly men of a rather low station in life. A skid road led from the outlying area where timber cutting was done to the sawmill usually near a city or source of power such as a millrace. "skid row" referred to the row of low cost wooden shanties which sprang up along the skid road. Persons living in these shanties were associated with or subservient to the skidders, timber cutters etc and usually represented the lowest station in the social life of a town or village. Skid row was often populated with prostitutes, homeless, paupers, transients etc. After being foreclosed on by the bank, the widow Jenkins and her children had go live on skid row and take her chances.

la·con·ic

   [luh-kon-ik] 

adjective

using few words; expressing much in few words; concise: alaconic reply.

gre·gar·i·ous

  [gri-gair-ee-uhs] 

adjective

1.

fond of the company of others; sociable.

2.

living in flocks or herds, as animals.

3.

Botany . growing in open clusters or colonies; not mattedtogether.

4.

pertaining to a flock or crowd.

gar·ru·lous

  [gar-uh-luhs, gar-yuh-]

adjective

1.

excessively talkative in a rambling, roundabout manner,especially about trivial matters.

2.

wordy or diffuse: a garrulous and boring speech.

vi·ti·ate

  [vish-ee-eyt]

verb (used with object), vi·ti·at·ed, vi·ti·at·ing.

1.

to impair the quality of; make faulty; spoil.

2.

to impair or weaken the effectiveness of.

3.

to debase; corrupt; pervert.

4.

to make legally defective or invalid; invalidate: to vitiate aclaim.

scotch

¹   [skoch] 

verb (used with object)

1.

to put a definite end to; crush; stamp out; foil: to scotch arumor; to scotch a plan.

2.

to cut, gash, or score.

3.

to injure so as to make harmless.

4.

to block or prop with a wedge or chock.
_______________________________


over a barrel in a situation in which someone has no choice about what to do The software company has you over a barrel – if you don't accept the license, you can't use the software. Usage notes: usually used with have, as in the example Etymology: based on the idea of making someone lie on a barrel (a large, curved container) so they will be unable to move freely See also: barrel 

an·gle

²  [ang-guhl]Verb, an·gled, an·gling, noun

verb (used without object)

1.

to fish with hook and line.

2.

to attempt to get something by sly or artful means; fish: to angle for a compliment.

cotton on

[phrasal verb] informal : to begin to understand something : to catch on
▪ It took a while, but they are finally starting to cotton on. — often + to ▪ She cottoned on to the fact that I like her.

cotton to[phrasal verb]

cotton to (someone or something) US, informal : to begin to like someone or something
▪ We cottoned to our new neighbors right away. ▪ He doesn't cotton to the idea of having children.


long suit

n.

1. Games The suit in which a player holds the most cards in a given hand.

2. The personal quality or talent that is one's strongest asset.

douchebag
	An individual who has an over-inflated sense of self worth, compounded by a low level of intellegence, behaving ridiculously in front of colleagues with no sense of how moronic he appears.  Your boss is a real douchebag!

Word of the Day

milk churn 

British English a tall round metal container with a lid, used to carry milk from farms

Word of the Day

es·cha·tol·o·gy

 [es-kuh-tol-uh-jee]

noun Theology .

1.

any system of doctrines concerning last, or final, matters,as death, the Judgment, the future state, etc.

2.

the branch of theology dealing with such matters.

sca·tol·o·gy

  [skuh-tol-uh-jee] 

noun

1.

the study of or preoccupation with excrement or obscenity.

2.

obscenity, especially words or humor referring toexcrement.

3.

the study of fossil excrement.