For Sunday, March 7: Sparks are flying

Sparks will fly as grace collides with the dark inside of us. Tenth Avenue North

This is what I imagine it looks like when grace collides with the dark inside of me. Just like when a welder touches his blowtorch to the metal. When the heat collides with the cold sparks fly. Grace is the heat that causes sparks to fly when it is allowed to touch the dark and cold places in my life. I need grace, so do you. It is what begins to melt the cold and what lights up the dark so that we can be changed. Remaining in that dark and cold place means I am unyielding, hardened, unusable. Allowing grace to touch me means I am willing to be shaped and used. So when the sparks start flying I know good things are coming. Sparks flying tells me that grace has touched me.

Comments

Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

More bang for your buck

This phrase was used a lot in 1953 but an earlier citation puts it at 1940 in a Metals and Plastics Publications advertisement. Read about it here . The phrase means you get more for your money.

Call it a Day

The literal use of this phrase hails from 1838 when the phrase originally was "call it half a day" to mean leaving work early. (source) The modern use of the phrase is to indicate ending something due to false sense of accomplishment.

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