Your Calling
The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
FREDERICK BUECHNERin Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC
Stranger Perspective
To offer hospitality to a stranger is to welcome something new, unfamiliar, and unknown into our life-world … Strangers have stories to tell which we have never heard before, stories which can redirect our seeing and stimulate our imaginations. The stories invite us to view the world from a novel perspective.
THOMAS OGLETREEin Hospitality to the Stranger
Mature Perspective
How does one keep from "growing old inside"? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people. … Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.
ROBERT MCAFEE BROWNin Creative Dislocation—The Movement of Grace
Deathly Fear
I have been shocked by the number of Christian men and women who come to their deathbeds knowing nothing about the God of love and mercy. They have known instead the Judge of impossible standards, and they have been, naturally enough, afraid to meet that God.
EVE KAVENAUGHin "Prayer of the Flesh"
Mending Our Ways
Man is born broke. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.
Eugene O'Neill, quoted in Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
The Gospel: Preach It
The truth is that we do not truly understand the Gospel if we spend all our time preaching it to Christians. … The Gospel is communication of news to those who do not know it, and we only really understand it as we are involved in so communicating it.
LESSLIE NEWBIGINin The Good Shepherd
The Gospel: Experience It
… if we are truly to communicate, if there is any real sharing of religious experience, we must have religious experience to share . …The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head in any neatly defined scheme of thought. He can only be experienced.
HALFORD E. LUCCOCKin Communicating the Gospel
The Gospel: Live It
All true knowledge of God is born out of obedience.
JOHN CALVINin The Institutes of the Christian Religion
Jesus' Prescription
Our Physician brought from heaven remedies for every single moral fault. The medical art cures fevers with cold compresses, and chills by applying heat. Similarly Jesus prescribed qualities contrary to our sins: self-restraint to the undisciplined, generosity to the stingy, gentleness to the irritable, and humility to the proud.
GREGORY THE GREATin "On Self-Renunciation"
A Miracle
The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.
SIMONE WEILin Waiting for God
January 10, 2000, Vol. 44, No. 1, Page 78
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