vii FOREWORD God, who loves us in these commonplace, blinkand-you’ll-miss-them kind of ways, our state of preoccupation becomes not only a tragedy but also a loss of opportunity for worship. So with this volume, we’d like to encourage you to make worship a part of your everyday moments. Praise God for well-written poems and fresh-cut grass and your favorite song when it comes on the radio. Thank Him for His goodness in a perfectly timed photo, in an art gallery or at a movie theater, for a day off of work or the first snow of the year or a friend asking how you are when you need someone to listen. And when you find a piece in this volume that makes you feel a sense of wonder, take a moment, take a breath, and praise Him for that too. Welcome to the 2022 issue of the Cedarville Review! Whether you’ve written one of these pieces, know a contributor, or just found this issue on a whim, I hope that you will find things in these pages to delight you, words and phrases that make you stop and savor them before reading on. I hope this slight book will be a treasure taken off the shelf and pored through for many years to come, and that your favorite pieces will become old friends read until the pages crease and yellow: these are the medals any well-loved book wears. We also hope that this book will encourage you to look with a fresh eye at the rest of the world. The calling of any artist is to defamiliarize things we have become too used to. Artists seek to bring our eyes and minds back to something we might otherwise have glossed over, which more often than not we do, laden as we are with Big, TimeConsuming Things that steal our focus. One of my professors said it this way: “we walk in a world of beauty and we miss it every day.” But we believe in a God that loves us not only in the big ways, such as our salvation, but also in little ways every day through a rosy sunrise or kind words from a friend or (my personal favorite) the addictive goodness of a latte. And when we believe in this kind of a
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