ICEMANforChrist

 

SMOKE IN THIS LIFE, NOT THE NEXT Mon, Oct 5 — St. Faustina Cigar: Smooth Sumatra Pour: Eagle Rare Reflection: Trust mercy more than memory. Faustina stands at the threshold where human frailty meets divine patience. Her diary is not a chronicle of visions; it is a record of trust. She teaches that mercy is not a feeling but a surrender — a willingness to let God rewrite what memory insists on repeating. Memory clings to wounds, failures, and unfinished penance. Mercy moves past them. Memory keeps a man in yesterday. Mercy pulls him into the present where Christ actually lives. Tonight’s Smooth Sumatra fits the day. Its gentler leaf, its mild sweetness, its steady burn — all echo Faustina’s quiet insistence that God’s justice is never separated from His tenderness. Eagle Rare , with its long finish and patient warmth, mirrors the slow, deliberate way mercy works: not by erasing the past, but by healing it. And then the American apparition — Latrobe, 1859. A Benedictine novice sees a...

  SMOKE IN THIS LIFE, NOT THE NEXT Sun, Oct 4 — Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost / St. Francis of Assisi   Cigar: Rustic Broadleaf  Pour: Buffalo Trace Reflection: Simplicity restores the soul. Paul’s insistence on our former death is not morbid; it is medicinal. He speaks with the clarity of a man who has seen the grave from the inside. In Ephesians he says we were dead in trespasses and sins. In Colossians he repeats it, adding the uncircumcision of the flesh. In Romans he expands the image, describing the fruit of death borne in our bodies. Paul is not layering metaphors. He is naming a condition. Before Christ, we were not spiritually sluggish or morally confused. We were dead to God, incapable of life, incapable of love, incapable of obedience. The corpse cannot revive itself; it can only be raised. This is why simplicity restores the soul. Francis understood that resurrection requires space. A man cluttered with possessions, ambitions, and self‑importance cannot...