I love alliteration, and I love some sort of rhythm/structure/order. And so I’m going to be posting “five favorite Friday links” each week of blogs I’ve read and enjoyed. Here they are:

1. “You May Be A Book Hoarder If …” at Barnes & Noble describes our family exactly. Our furniture dilemmas usually stem from the need of more bookshelves for all of our books. And, nope, we haven’t gone digital (which would make more sense – but then you lose the feel of the pages). One of my summer goals for our family is to do a book purge (gasp!) as I think this alone would simplify our lives a bit.
2. In “There is now no condemnation,” my good friend Emily writes of mommy guilt and the freedom we can know from it.
3. “On blogging and the rules that feel like rules but aren’t really” Lisa talks about the “good ole days” of blogging and reminds us all that blogging is meant to be enjoyable and free, not just about the rules that have crept up surrounding it.
4. Our girls are only going to be starting preschool in the fall, but it’s never too soon to begin thinking and praying about school options. Gospel Coalition did a three part series, and here’s the first one on choosing public education.
5. “Of summer’s lease and sabbath song” is a post as beautiful as its title on Jen Wilkin’s blog. This vignette alone captures what I love about it:

But the highest item on our summer agenda, and the one we all look forward to the most, is rest. There will be time to listen to the cicadas.

Here is a remarkable thing about the Christian faith: we have a God who commands us to rest. Our God commands us to hold still, to cease from labor, to actively enter into repose – not merely as a means to regain our strength, but as an act of worship.

The gods of other religions and the god of self, these demand ceaseless toil. To please these gods, worshippers work incessantly at the business of self-denial, approval-seeking, pilgrimage – repeated rites that strive to prove the worth of the supplicant and earn the favor of the deity.

Those who seek the approval of lesser gods commit themselves to a course of utter exhaustion.

But not the Christian. In our obedient observance of rest, the work of our Savior is understood most clearly. We rest not as an attempt to earn his approval, but as an assent that his approval has already been earned in the sun-going-down, Sabbath-initiating work of Christ on the cross. Christ worked that we may rest. He, in a gathering dusk, exhaling the first note of a blood-bought chorus of infinite rest.