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I AM GROWING accustomed to the grace of gradual illumination, so it is a delight and no real surprise when I see God's messages to me in the scattered rainbows on my wall at sunrise.

LUCI SHAW in Weavings

IF WE CANNOT see God in the commonalities that constitute daily life, we would not recognize Christ if he walked into the room and sat down beside us.

DON C. SKINNER, A Passage through Sacred History

GENERALIZATION is the death of art. It's in the details where God resides.

ARTHUR MILLER, quoted in Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture

THE ONE WHO IS going to associate intimately with God must go beyond all that is visible and (lifting up his own mind, as to a mountaintop, to the invisible and incomprehensible) believe that the divine is there where the understanding does not reach.

GREGORY OF NYSSA, The Life of Moses

GOD, OF YOUR GOODNESS, give me yourself, for you are enough for me, and I can ask nothing less which can pay you full worship. And if I ask anything less, always I am in want, but only in you do I have everything.

JULIAN OF NORWICH, Showings

LAST NIGHT in the wee hours a thought came to me, to trust God beyond my own understanding of God. … The very next day and the day after I shared the thought with the young people I was teaching, and then I shared it with two friends my own age, and one said to trust God beyond our own understanding is what is required of us in dying, for our own understanding cannot penetrate the veil of death.

JOHN S. DUNNE, A Journey with God in Time: A Spiritual Quest

I WILL ALWAYS regard it as an example of God's great mercy and inexhaustible creativity that so unpromising a creature [as I] might begin to turn her life to the good. And not only that: the very things that had gotten me into such irredeemable messes were the instruments of my conversion.

KATHLEEN NORRIS, The Virgin of Bennington

THE GOSPEL message says: "You don't live in a mechanistic world ruled by necessity; you don't live in a random world ruled by chance; you live in a world ruled by the God of Exodus and Easter. He will do things in you that neither you nor your friends would have supposed possible. …"

EUGENE H. PETERSON, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work

"YOU DON'T have to prove anything," my mother said. "Just be ready for what God sends."

WILLIAM STAFFORD, from poem Are You Mr. William Stafford?

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April 2005, Vol. 49, No. 4