WHEN GOD FINDS US Kierkegaard said that most of us read the Bible the way a mouse tries to remove the cheese from the trap without getting caught. Some of us have mastered that. We read the story as though it were about someone else a long time ago; that way we don’t get caught. But if we see the Bible as the story of the triumph of God’s grace, the story of God searching for us, then look out. The story will come alive. God will find us and we will know that we are found.
—Maxie Dunnam in Living the Psalms
MORE THAN ONE USE [Y]ou don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.
—Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird
WORTHWHILE LIFE Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
—Mark Twain, quoted in “A Word a Day” electronic posting
DESENSITIZED ABOUT GOD It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear the story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all.
—Dorothy Sayers, quoted in God in Pain, by Barbara Brown Taylor
GOD IN ME Compassion lies at the heart of our prayer for our fellow human beings. When I pray for the world, I become the world; when I pray for the endless needs of the millions, my soul expands and wants to embrace them all and bring them into the presence of God. But in the midst of that experience I realize that compassion is not mine but God’s gift to me. I cannot embrace the world, but God can. I cannot pray, but God can pray in me. When God became as we are, that is, when God allowed all of us to enter into the intimacy of the divine life, it became possible for us to share in God’s infinite compassion.
—Henry Nouwen in Seeds of Hope
OUR HUMAN CONDITION There is no innocence in childhood, only less mature depravities.
—Gerald Early in The Hungry Mind Review (Winter 1996-1997)
SIN MARS A WORK OF ART When I feel my sin and am shaken because of it, it is not at all because of feeling inferior to others. It is because one of God’s masterpieces has become stained with sin.
—Paul Tournier in Escape from Loneliness
TASTE ABANDONED We live in a country that has never made a movie about Leonardo da Vinci and has produced three about Joey Buttafuoco (famous only for having had a teenage lover, Amy Fisher, who shot his wife).
—Times Literary Supplement (Dec. 9, 1994)
SHOUTING EDUCATORS I’ve always tried to be aware of what I say in my films because all of us who make motion pictures are teachers, teachers with very loud voices.
—Star Wars creator George Lucas, on receiving an award for career achievement
HOME MISSION The greatest mission field we face is not in some faraway land. The strange and foreign culture most American evangelicals fear is not across the ocean. It’s barely across the street. The culture most lost to the gospel is our own—our children and neighbors. It’s a culture that can’t say two sentences without referencing a TV show or a pop song, and that can’t remember what it was like to have to get up and change channels. It’s a culture more likely to have a body part pierced than it is to know why Sara laughed. … It’s a culture that we stopped evangelizing, and have instead declared a culture war upon.
—Dwight Ozard in Prism (July/Aug. 1996)
AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH People who want to be amused have lost the art of living.
—Holbrook Jackson in Platitudes in the Making
DUAL DANGERS It is equally dangerous to man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing God.
—Blaise Pascal in Pensees
POOR TRADEOFF The tragedy of much modern life is that the abandonment of the knowledge of God means that futility has taken over.
—Leon Morris in The Cross of Jesus
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