People

Jesus

+ “It is the not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
- Matthew 9:12-13

Albert Camus

+ “I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is”

Andrew Greeley

+ “Reject Christianity, if you will, out of motives of cynicism; turn away from it because you believe. Reality is malign and punitive; choose a God that is cantankerous, vindictive, or forgetful, or determined to keep man in his place, if such a God is more to your choosing. If you cannot accept the idea that love is at the core of the universe, that is your privilege. If you do not believe that the Absolute passionately wants to be our friend and our lover, then by all means reject such a seemingly absurd notion. If you do not believe that we have the enthusiasm and the strength and the courage and the creativity to love one another as friends, then quickly cast aside such an incredible idea into the trash can. And if you think it ridiculous to believe that life will triumph over death, then don’t bother with Christianity, because you can’t be a Christian unless you believe that.
- What a Modern Catholic Believes about God

Andy Finch

+ “If God is really our Light, I want to be his moon, like earth’s moon is to the sun.”

+ “We’re always headed into a storm, in a storm, or coming from a storm.”

+ “When Jesus works miracles, pigs die.”

Annie Dillard

+ “It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

Brennan Manning

+ “While there is much we may have earned — our degree, our salary, our home and garden, a Miller Lite, and a good night’s sleep — all this is possibly only because we have been given so much: life itself, eyes to see and hands to touch, a mind to shape ideas, and a heart to beat with love.”
- The Ragamuffin Gospel

+ “When we accept ourselves for what we are, we decrease our hunger for power or the acceptance of others because our self-intimacy reinforces our inner sense of security. We are no longer preoccupied with being powerful or popular. We no longer fear criticism because we accept the reality of our human limitations. Once integrated, we are less often plagued with the desire to please others because simply being true to ourselves brings lasting peace. We are grateful for life and we deeply appreciate and love ourselves.”
- The Ragamuffin Gospel

+ “In Christ Jesus free from fear empowers us to let go of the desire to appear good, so that we can move freely in the mystery of who we really are. Preoccupation with projecting the “nice guy” image, impressing newcomers with our experience, and rely heavily on the regard of others leads to self-consciousness, sticky pedestal behavior, and unfreedom in the iron grip of human respect… For most of us it takes a long time for the Spirit of freedom to cleanse us of the subtle urges to be admired for our studied goodness.”
- Chapter 8: Freedom from Fear, The Ragamuffin Gospel

+ “Evangelical faith is the antithesis of lukewarmness: It always means a profound dissatisfaction with our present state. In faith there is movement and development. Each day something is new. To be Christian, faith has to be new — that is, alive and growing. It cannot be static, finished, settled. When Scripture, prayer, worship, ministry become routine, they are dead. When I conclude that I can now cope with the awful love of God, I have headed for the shallows to avoid the deep. I could more easily contain Niagara Falls in a teacup than I can comprehend the wild, uncontainable love of God.”
- Chapter 9: The Second Call, The Ragamuffin Gospel

+ “Perhaps we are all in the position of the man in Morton Kelsey’s story who came to the edge of an abyss. As he stood there, wondering what to do next, he was amazed to discover a tightrope stretched across the abyss. And slowly, surely, across the rope came an acrobat pushing before him a wheelbarrow with another performer in it. When they finally reached the safety of solid ground, the acrobat smiled at the man’s amazement. ‘Don’t you think I can do it again?’ he asked.
And the man replied, ‘Why yes, I certainly believe you can.’
The acrobat put his question again, and when the owner was the same, he pointed to the wheelbarrow and said, ‘Good! Then get in and I will take you across.’
What did the traveler do? This is just the question we have to ask ourselves about Jesus Christ. Do we state our belief in Him in no uncertain terms, even in briefly articulated creeds, and then refuse to get into the wheelbarrow?”
- Chapter 9: The Second Call, The Ragamuffin Gospel

+ “We get caught in a hectic maze. Rising when the clock determines. Battered by news headlines that seem remote and beyond our reach. Jangled by all the mechanical operations that launch us into activity and productivity. Tested by traffic, forced to calculate time and distance to the second. Elevators and phones and gadgets guide us through necessary interactions and keep human interactions superficial and at a minimum. Our concentration is interspersed by meeting and small crises. At the end of the day we rewind ourselves: traffic, automation, headlines, until we set that alarm ticking and timing. Little room for responding humanly and humanely to the day’s events; little time to enter into the wisdom and freshness and the promise of its opportunities. We feel our lives closing in, confining, and conforming us.
We settle in and settle down to lives of comfortable piety and well-fed virtue. We grow complacent and lead practical lives. Our feeble attempts at prayer are filled with stilted phrases addressed to an impassive deity. Even times of worship become trivialized.”
- Chapter 10: The Victorious Limp, The Ragamuffin Gospel

+ “As Annie Dillard says, ‘There is always an enormous temptation to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.’ Along the way I opted for slavery and lost the desire for freedom. I loved my captivity and imprisoned myself i nteh desire for things I hated. I hardened my heart against true love. I abandoned prayer and took flight from the simple sacredness of my life. On some given day when grace overtook me and I returned to prayer, I half-expected Jesus to ask, ‘Who dat?’”
- Chapter 10: The Victorious Limp, The Ragamuffin Gospel

C.S. Lewis

+ “Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.”
- Mere Christianity

+ “Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party. We are looking for an ally where we are offered either a Master or a Judge…. a Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian.”
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

+”…wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way.”
- Mere Christianity

Dave Huffman

+ “Visible problems are issues with the root, not with the fruit.”

David Platt

+ “To this point, we have seen how the American dream radically differs from the call of Jesus and the essence of the gospel. This differentiation is heightened when we contrast trust in the power of God with reliance on our own abilities.
As the American dream goes, we can do anything we set our minds to accomplish. There is no limit to what we can accomplish when we combine ingenuity, imagination, and innovation with skill and hard work. We can earn any degree, start any business, climb any ladder, attain any prize, and achieve any goal. James Truslow Adams, who is credited with coining the phrase “American dream” in 1931, spoke of it as “a dream… in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recgonized by others for what they are.”
So is there anything wrong with this picture? Certainly hardwork and high aspirations are not bad, and the freedom to pursue our goals is something we should celebrate. Scripture explicitly commends all these things. But underlying this American dream are a dangerous assumption, that if we are not cautious, we will unknowingly accept and a deadly goal that, if we are not careful, we will ultimately achieve.
The dangerous assumption we unknowingly accept in the American dream is that our greatest asset is our own ability. The American dream prizes what people can accomplish when they believe in themselves and trust in themselves, and we are drawn toward such thinking. But the gospel has different priorities. The gospel beckons us to die to ourselves and to believe in God and to trust in his power. In the gospel, God confronts us with our utter inability to accomplish anything of value apart from him. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”
Even more important is the subtly fatal goal we will achieve when we pursue the American dream. As long as we achieve our desires in our own power, we will always attribute it to our own glory. To use Adams’s words, we will be “recognized by other for what [we] are.” This, after all, is the goal of the American dream: to make much of ourselves. But here the gospel and the American dream are clearly and ultimately antithetical to each other. While the goal of the American dream is to make much of us, the goal of the gospel is to make much of God.”
- Chapter 3: Beginning at the End of Ourselves, Radical

+”So how do we do it? If making disciples is the plan of Christ, and if it is accessible to all of us and expected of all us, then how do we do it?
When you think about it, the fact that we lack a clear understanding about what it means to make disciples is astounding. This is the last command we have from Jesus to his followers before he left the earth. It is the central mission that Christ gave to his church before going to heaven. Yet if you were to ask individual Christians what it means to make disciples, you would likely get jumbled thoughts, ambiguous answers, and probably even some blank stares.
That’s where I was–and to some extent still am. The more I read the Gospels, the more I marvel at the simple genius of what Jesus was doing with his disciples. My mind tends to wander toward grandiose dreams and intricate strategies, and I’m struck when I see Jesus simply, intentionally, systematically, patiently walking alongside twelve men. Jesus reminds me that disciples are not mass-produced. Disciples of Jesus–genuine, committed, self-sacrificing followers of Christ–are not made overnight.
Making disciples is not an easy process. It is trying. It is messy. It is slow, tedious, even painful at times. It is all these things because it is relational. Jesus has not given us an effortless step-by-step formula for impacting nations for his glory. He has given us people, and he has said, “Live for them. Love them, serve them, and lead them. Lead them to follow me, and lead them to lead others to follow me. In the process you will multiply the gospel to the ends of the earth.”
- Chapter 5: The Multiplying Community, Radical

+”When we take responsibility for helping others grown in Christ, it automatically takes our own relationship with Christ to a new level.”
- Chapter 5: The Multiplying Community, Radical

+”I often as members of our church if they are receivers or reproducers of God’s Word. Let me illustrate the difference.
Imagine being in Sudan. You walk into a thatched hut with a small group of Sudanese church leaders, and you sit down to teach them God’s Word. As soon as you start, you lose eye contact with all of them. No one is looking at you, and you hardly see their eyes the rest of the time. The reason is because they’re writing down every word you say. They come up to you afterward and say, “Teacher, we are going to take everything we have learned from God’s Word, translate it into our languages, and teach it in our tribes.” They were not listening to receive but to reproduce.
Now journey with me to a contemporary worship service in the United States. Some people have their Bibles open, while others down have a Bible with them. A few people are taking notes, but for the most part they are passively sitting in the audience. While some are probably disengaged, others are intently focused on what the preacher is saying, listening to God’s Word to hear how it applies to their lives. But the reality is, few are listening to reproduce.
We are, by nature, receivers. Even if we have a desire to learn from God’s Word, we still listen from a default self-centered mind-set that is always asking, What can I get out of this? But as we have seen, this is unbiblical Christianity. What if we changed the question whenever we gather to learn God’s Word? What if we began to think, How can I listen to his Word so that I am equipped to teach this Word to others?”

+”We saw the gruesome reality of 1 Timothy 6 playing out in our hearts: “People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.” Paul is talking here about simply the desire to be rich. So how much more does it apply to those who actually are rich? Our possessions can be deadly. They can be subtly deadly.
That’s why Jesus said it’s hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Ultimately, Jesus was communication to this man that there was nothing we could do to enter the kingdom of God apart from total trust in God. It is impossible for us to earn our way into heaven. In the process, though, Jesus was exposing the barrier that this man’s wealth was to seeing his need for God. His wealth on earth would ultimately keep him from eternal treasure.”
- Chapter 5: The Multiplying Community, Radical

+”…Contemporary church-growth philosophers tell me in magazines, articles, fliers, and gimmicks that to be effective, we must organize everything we do in no more than six- or eight-week segments. Church-goers today want short-term commitments with long-term benefits.
I am thankful Christian history has not always operated on this philosophy. David Brainerd (1718-47) spent years suffering through loneliness, depression, and pain before he saw God bring revival among Native Americans in the Northeast. William Carey (1761-1834) stayed committed to preaching the gospel for seven years before he saw one person saved in India. John Hyde (1865-1912) wore his body down through long nights of prayer and fasting in order to see people come to Christ in one of the hardest mission fields in the world, the Punjab. The examples of Brainerd, Carey, and Hyde should inspire us to ask, ‘What if long-term benefits are actually reserved for long-term commitments?’
Even the world believes this. Why else would graduation high school seniors commit, at a minimum four years and thousands of dollars to further their education? Why else would law and medical students suffer through tireless word and grueling schedules? Why else would musicians practice their instruments day after day, or why else would athletes train year after year for a sport?”
- Chapter 9: The Radical Experiment, Radical

“When Jesus looked at the harassed and helpless multitudes, apparently his concern was not that the last would not come to the Father. Instead his concern was that his followers would not go to the lost [Matthew 10].
- Chapter 9: The Radical Experiment, Radical

+”My friend was staying in a hotel, and one morning around four o’clock, he was awakened by a loud noise outside. He staggered over to the window and pulled back the curtains to see a stadium filled with people. He wondered, What kind of sports do Koreans play at four in the morning? Frustrated, he crawled back into bed and tried to sleep through the noise coming from the stadium crowd across the street.
Later that morning he went down to the hotel lobby and asked the manager what kind of sporting even had been going on in the stadium. The hotel manager responded, “Oh, sir, that was not a sporting event. That was the church gathered for prayer.”
You and I live in a culture where we gather in stadiums and around televisions for hours at a time to watch guys run around a field with a pigskin ball in their bands as they try to cross a white line. We express enthusiasm, emotion, and affection for football and other sports, and it begs the question, what would happen in our culture if the church prayed with such passion? What would happen if Jesus dominated our affections more than the superficial trivialities that garner our attention? What would happen if we spent hours before God praying on behalf of the church, the lost, and the poor around the world?
- Chapter 9: The Radical Experiment, Radical

+”I remember when I was first preparing to go to Sudan, a nation impoverish by years of civil war. The trip was going to cost me around three thousand dollars. It wasn’t easy to travel in to Sudan since they were still at war, and we would have to charter a plane and spend a few extra days to make that happen. I remember one dear lady in the church coming up to me and asking, “Why don’t you just send the three thousand dollars to the people in Sudan? Wouldn’t that be a better use of money than your spending a week and a half with them? Think of how far that money could go.”
I wrestled with that question. Was I wasting these funds in order to go when I would simply give the money instead? Should I even be going? I continued wrestling with that question until I got to Sudan. There I had a conversation with Andrew that shed some light on the question.
Andrew was sharing with me about his life in Sudan over the last twenty years. He had known was since he was born, and he described facets of the suffering and persecution his people had been through. He told me about the various groups, most of them secular or government organizations, who had brought supplies to them during that time, and he expressed thanks for the generosity of so many people. But then he looked at me and asked, “Even in light of all these things that people have given us, do you want to know how you can tell who a true brother is?… A true brother comes to be with you in your time of need.” Then he looked me in the eye and said, “David, you are a true brother. Thank you for coming to be with us.”
- Chapter 9: The Radical Experiment, Radical

Dorothy Day

+ “The longer I live, the more I see God at work in people who don’t have the slightest interest in religion and never read the Bible and wouldn’t know what to do if they were persuaded to go inside a church. I always knew how much I admired certain men and women (my “radical friends”) who were giving their lives to help others get a better break; but now I realize how spiritual some of them were, and I’m ashamed of myself for not realizing that long ago. …”

+ “I do not believe people can fight with love…”

Doug Holliday

+ “When you have open hands, God can put more in them.”
- Love At Work, ’08

+ “It’s not enough to see, it’s not even enough to feel… we have to do!”
- Love At Work, ’08

+ “Passion serves as an intensifier:

• add it to happiness and you get sheer joy and excitement
• add it to sadness and you get severe depression
• add it to love and you get romance”

Erwin McManus

+ “God made us for relationships, and we only begin to experience life fully when we move toward healthy relationships and health community.”
- Soul Cravings

+ “When we don’t know who we are, when we have no clue as to who we were meant to become, we try to become something we are not.”
- Soul Cravings

+ “We only truly come to know ourselves in the context of others. The more isolated and disconnected we are, the more shattered and distorted our self-identity.”
- Soul Cravings

+ “Sometimes the worst thing for you is to get what you want.”
- Soul Cravings

+ “Faith is simply the word for trust when used in relation to God.”
- Soul Cravings

+ “When we live beneath our humanity, we become inhumane. When we live genuinely human lives, we become translucent reflections of divinity.”
- Soul Cravings

+ “Why is it that the most dangerous place in the world is to be in the hands of a human being unmoved by love?”
- Soul Cravings

+ “…even if you do not believe in God, your life may be more shaped by your lack of relationship to Him than any other relationship in your life.”
- Soul Cravings

+ “… all of us have dreams. More than that, all of us need dreams. Some of us, sadly, are just sleeping through them.”
- Soul Cravings

John Wesley

+ “Whether we think of, or speak to, God, whether we act or suffer for Him, all is prayer, when we have no other object than His love, and the desire of pleasing Him. All that a Christian does, even in eating and sleeping, is prayer, when it is done in simplicity, according to the order of God … In souls filled with love, the desire to please God is a continual prayer.”
- A Plain Account of Christian Perfection

+ “[Wesley] had just finished buying some pictures for his room when oen of the chambermaids came to his door. It was a Winter day and he noticed that she had only a thin linen gown to wear for protection against the cold. He reached into his pocket to give her some money for a coat, and found he had little left. It struck him that the Lord was not pleased with how he had spent his money. He asked himself: “Will Thy Master say, ‘Well done, good and faithful?’ Thou hast adorned thy walls with the money that might have screen this poor creature from the cold! O justice! O mercy! Are not these pictures the blood of this poor maid?”
- Charles Edward White, “Four Lessons on Money from One of the World’s Richest Preachers,” Christian History 7, no. 19 (1998): 24.

Katie Davis

+ “When we try to feed ourselves and get the things we need on our own, we are really trying to do something only God can do properly. When we seek Him first, he gives us the things we need… gladly.”

Lawrence Holben

+ “… personalism views true internal growth and integration as… making us more fit to be active participants in redemptive history, which has to do not only with the salvation of souls but also the remaking of every element of the wounded creation, including human society.”
- All the Way to Heaven, Chapter 4

+ “If, as Christians, our goal is to know and become more like the God we worship, then surely we are never so close to konwing the heart of God, never so close to reflecting the divine life, as we are when we sit helpless in the midst of anguish and carry it, take it into ourselves, let our hearts be broken on the rack of human pain.”
- All the Way to Heaven, Chapter 6

+ “But even for the more fortunate, the [Catholic] Worker would insist, urban life by its very nature conflicts with what we were created to be: By its size, it defeats community; by paving over the earth, it cuts us off from our necessary tie to productive work with the soil; by its frantic pace and endless diversions, it distracts us from our calling to conscious, intentional living. By its tolerance of vice, it tempts us to devalue the moral significance of our own lives and the lives of others; by its anonymity, it isolates us.”
- All the Way to Heaven, Chapter 5

+ “… the struggle is this: to remember that God is working in every person on the planet, even in those who are most annoyingly at odds with the clarity of your own perspective.”
- All the Way to Heaven

Luis Gonzàlez

+ “I hate theology and here’s why: people have made theology knowing about God, rather than knowing God.”

Mohandas Gandhi

+ “Where there’s injustice, I always believe in fighting. The question is do you fight to change things or do you fight to punish? For myself, I find we’re all such sinners we should leave punishment to God. And if we really want to change things, there are better ways of doing it than derailing trains or slashing someone with a sword.”

+ “The function of a civil resistance is to provoke response… and we will continue to provoke until they respond or they change the law. They are not in control. We are. That is the strength of civil resistance.”

+ Interviewer: It’s very hard for me to see this as the solution to the 20th century’s problems.
“I have friends who keep telling me how much it costs them to keep me in poverty. But I know happiness does not come with things; even 20th century things. It can come from work and pride in what you do. India lives in her villages and the terrible poverty there can only be removed if their local skills can be revived. Poverty is the worse form of violence. And a constructive program is the only non-violent solution to India’s agony. It will not necessarily be progress for India if it simply imports the unhappiness of the West.”

Pete Greig

+ “With suicide rates among young men soaring alongside self-harm and eating disorders in women, we can say with some confidence that this generation may well be hurting more profoundly than any other. Amidst sparking creativity, spectacular innovatio, and unprecedented wealth, growing up in the West means for many a sense of alienation, a hunger for intimacy, authenticity, and hope.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 1

+ “When I worked in Hong Kong with heroin addicts as part of Jackie Pullinger’s remarkable ministry, she would say, ‘If you want to see revival, plant your church in the gutter.’ Jesus warned us that the upwardly mobile middle classes would always find it extremely hard to receive Him. But among the losers, the freaks, and the apparent failures, what one preacher called the ‘shrimps and wimps and those with limps’… that is actually where the Gospel spreads quite easily.
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 1

+ “Revolutions always begin in the streets with the dispossed — never in the corridors of power.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 1

+ “I think there’s a danger spiritually, for many of us, that if God packed up and left town today we might not noticed until tomorrow, or worse. We have strategies and structures that can easily bypass the Holy Spirit, strategic ways of prioritizing time and advancing the kingdom which were ignored completely by Jesus.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 1

+ “I’m not very good at hearing God’s voice. I often get it wrong and have learned to cover myself to save embarrassment! When He does get through to me, it is often as I contemplate, write, and dialogue. For me there are times in discussion and even in writing, when my heart beats a little bit faster. It’s like the PA system has been turned up spiritually, and I just know that my words mysteriously forming shapes around something God is saying.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 1

This next quote is a conversation between Pete and God.
+ “Pete?” He said, “Congratulations! Your way of taking Jericho makes perfect sense…” There was an uneasy pause as I guessed the next bit. “The only trouble is, son, it doesn’t actually work.” I knew it was true — after eight years of hard work, and now these thoughts of networking new churches, no matter how hard we tried and planned, our efforts were achieving a mere fraction of what we wanted to see. “On the other hand, ” God continued with relish, “My way of taking Jericho makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.” He punctuated each word, no doubt smiling with delight at the irony of it all: “And yet” — and here was the killer — “MY WAY WORKS!”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 3

+ “A prayer room is first and foremost a living room — a place where the Father waits for His children to come and climb into His loving arms. It’s a place where we can experience peace so that we can make peace later; a place where we receive our Father’s acceptance so that we can love even those who laugh at us later in the day.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 3

+ “In the contemplative traditions, he [Brennan Manning] told me, prayer is not primarily about changing things somewhere out there. It is first and foremost about changing something, “in here,” and he patted his chest. The most powerful thing that can happen in the place of prayer is that you yourself become the prayer. You leave the prayer room able as Jesus’ hands and feet on earth. This is what is means to pray continually, to see with the eyes of Jesus to hear with His ears with every waking moment.
Henri Nouwen pointed out in his book, The Way of the Heart, the literal translation of the phrase “pray always” is “come to rest.” The Greek word for rest is heyschia and so Nouwen wrote, “Hesychia, the rest which flows from unceasing prayer, needs to be sought at all costs, even when the flesh is itchy, the world alluring and the demons noisy.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 6

+ “I’m convinced that some churches would cease to exist if they were to cancel the Sunday service…”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 6

+ “Richard Peace, writing in Meditative Prayer, describes examen* like this: “In the end the prayer of examen is about noticing: noticing the good gifts God gives us, noticing the presence of God in our lives, and noticing the ways we fail God. When we noticed, we become more conscious, when we become more conscious we grow.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 8
* an approach to prayer coming from the traditions of St. Ignatius of Loyola which involves a deliberate commitment to recollect events in the presence of God

+ “God loves beauty and creativity. He has made for us a world that is visually spectacular. We read in Genesis that we are made in God’s image—He is an artist, a Creator! Similarly, the first man in the Bible to be described as being filled with the Holy Spirit is not some great king or prophet. It is a craftsman named Bezalel, anointed by God to decorate the prayer room—the tabernacle (Exodus 35:30-31).
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 8

+ Insert “the Vision”

+ “So much of our faith, if we are not very careful, can be second-hand experience. We listen to talks that tell us what to think. We read books that inspire us with other peoples’ experiences of God. But alone with God in a prayer room, it’s time to get the Bible open for yourself, going straight to the source. It’s time to dialogue directly with God face to face without a middleman. In such a context, God often is able to speak to us and touch us in a way that no ministry session could ever achieve.
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 12

+ “For thirty years,” Ian reflected later, “The church has been gathering to say ‘Come, Holy Spirit,’ and in His grace He has come. But perhaps the tables are turning. Perhaps now it is the Holy Spirit’s turn and He is saying to us, ‘Come, holy people.’ Perhaps the Holy Spirit is waiting for us to attend His meetings in surprising places.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 16

+ “We are the light of the world, but no one wants to stare at the bulb. We are the salt of the earth, but a whole plate of the stuff will make you sick. The people of God are called to scatter and mix, to mingle and move, to influence from a position of weakness, like a small child in a large family, like yeast in a loaf, like a mustard seed beneath a pavement.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 16

+ “…Of course, God will still attend our meetings—Jesus has promised to come whenver we gather in His name. And He is, let’s remember, omnipresent! But perhaps there is a weariness, even a reluctance in His heart, as He gazes back over his shoulder, out the church door, and into the street.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 16

+ “What does it mean to pray 24-7? I tmeans living our whole lives, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, in the grateful awareness of God’s presence and with a desire to please Him always. Prayer is not just about the contemplative moments of the moments when I’m consciously firing words at God. The call to ‘pray without ceasing’ (Thessalonians 5:17) is a call to remember Christ’s presence continually in the subconscious as well as the conscious realms of life. But how am I to do this? How am I to keep Christ in my subconscious, in my reflex-reactions even when I’m sleeping or working or watching a movie? How am I to be Christian by default as well as determination?
The key is to maintain a rhythm, a heartbeat of disciplined prayer, in which I encounter Christ regularly, deliberately, and consciously. The spinoff of these times, as you will see in the character of any older person who has spent a great deal of their lives contemplating Jesus, is that His presence thereby moves by a process of osmosis from the conscious into the subconscious mind. As we open the door, again and again, to Christ, He comes in day by day and eats with us, laughs with us, shares with us, until we acquire His mannerisms and know His very thoughts.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 16

+ “The ultimate 24-7 prayer room is the human heart fully surrendered to God and not a room full of coffee mugs and hand-drawn pictures!”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 16

+ “God often blesses relationships. I sometimes think He likes to use relationships more than individuals. There was Moses and Aaron, David and Jonathan, Naomi and Ruth, Elijah and Elisha, Mary and Elizabeth, Jesus and his cousin John, and Paul and Timothy, to name but a few.
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 17

+ “Like all relationships, intimacy grows from hanging out with the one we love.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 19

+ “In ancient times people sought sanctuary from persecution in church buildings. Today many church buildings are locked shut six days a week, and even if they’re open, they are deserted. Boiler Rooms [24-7 prayer rooms] can be magnetic for non-Christians because they are full of God, full of His people, and always open.”
- Red Moon Rising, Chapter 19

Peter Maurin

+ “a person cannot serve God without serving the Common Good.“

+ “They say that I am crazy
because I refuse to be crazy
the way everyone else is crazy.”

+ “Thought and action
must be combined.
When thought
is separated from action,
it becomes academic.
When thought
is related to action
it becomes dynamic.”

Roshad Thomas

+ “Servanthood gives you access to life.”
- Love At Work, 08′

+ “We come to Love At Work think we’re gonna work on a house, but a lot of the time, we’re the house God has brought to Love At Work to be worked on.”
- Love At Work, 08′

Richard Bach

+ ” ‘If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we’ve destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have is Now. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don’t you think that we might see each other once or twice?”
- Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Shane Claiborne

+ “Christendom seems very unprepared for the people who take the gospel seriously.”
- The Irresistible Revolution

+ “I’m not too concerned with what I’m going to do [in the future]. I am more interested in who I am becoming. I want to be a lover of God and people.”
- The Irresistible Revolution

+ “So live real good and get beat up real bad. Dance until they kill you and then we’ll dance some more.”
- The Irresistible Revolution

+ “When people asked who I was voting for, I would say, ‘My President has already ascended the throne… I don’t believe that God needs a commander-in-chief or a millionaire in Washington. After all, we vote every day by how we live, what we buy, and who we pledge allegiance to, so I just resolved to write in my vote, as I did not find it on the national ballot.’ ”
- The Irresistible Revolution

+ “… if I am going to discourage abortion… I had better be ready to adopt some babies and care for some mothers.”
- The Irresistible Revolution

Tagore

+ “No, it is not yours to open buds into blossoms.
Shake the bud, strike it; it is beyond your power to make it blossom.
Your touch soils it, you tear its petals to pieces and strew them in the dust.
But no colours appear, and no perfume.
Ah! It is not for you to open the bud into blossom.

He who can open the bud does it so simply.
He gives it a glance, and the life-sap stirs through its veins.
At his breath the flower spreads its wings and flutters in the wind.
Colours flush out like heart-longings, the perfume betrays a sweet secret.
He who can open the bud does it so simply.”
- Fruit Gathering

(Agnesë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu) Mother Theresa

+ “We’re not called to be successful. Only to be faithful.”

Thomas Merton

+ “A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.”

+ “One who never thinks of the hour of his death cannot make really spiritual decisions during his life. He will never be anything more than a short-sighted opportunist whose decisions will have no lasting value.
- Spiritual Direction & Meditation

Above all, our life should always be seen in the light of the Cross. The Passion, Death and Ressurection of Christ the Lord have entirely changed the meaning and orientation of man’s existence and of all that he does. One who cannot realize this will spend his life building a spider’s web that has no substance and no real reason for existence.”
- Spiritual Direction & Meditation

+ “Our own life, our own experience, our own duties and difficulties, naturally enter into our meditations. Actually, a lot of “distractions” would vanish if we realized that we are not bound at all times to ignore the practical problems of our life when we are at prayer. On the contrary, sometimes these problems actually ought to be the subject of meditation.”
- Spiritual Direction & Meditation

+ “The spiritual man is one who, “whether he eats or drinks or whatever else he does, does all for the glory of God” (I Cor. 10:31). Again, this does not mean that he merely registers in his mind an abstract intention to glorify God. It means that in all his actions he is free from the superficial automatism of conventional routine. It means that in all that he does he acts freely, simply, spontaneously, from the depths of his heart, moved by love.”
- Spiritual Direction & Meditation

+ “A contemplative is not one who takes his prayer seriously, but one who takes God seriously, who is famished for truth, who seeks to live in generous simplicity, in the spirit.”
- Spiritual Direction & Meditation

+ “Meditation is for those who are not satisfied with a merely objective and conceptual knowledge about life, about God — about ultimate realities. They want to enter into an intimate contact with truth itself, with God. They want to experience the deepest realities of life by living them. Meditation is the means to that end.
- Spiritual Direction & Meditation

+ “The price of true recollection is a firm resolve to take no wilful interest in anything that is not useful or necessary to our interior life. The world we live in assails us on every side with useless appeals to emotion and to sense appetite. Radios, newspapers, movies, television, billboards, neon-signs surround us with a perpetual incite to pour out our money and our vital energies in futile transitory satisfactions… Eventually all will consist in the noise that is made and there will be no satisfaction left in the world except that of vain hopes and anticipations that can never be fulfilled.

I say this in order to show that very much of what we read in magazines or newspapers or see and hear in movies or elsewhere, is completely useless from every point of view. The first thing I must do if I want to practice meditation is to develop a strong resistance to the futile appeals which modern society makes to my five senses. Hence I will have to mortify my desires.

I do not speak here of extraordinary ascetic practices; merely of self-denial required to live by the standards of reason and of the Gospels. In present-day America, such self-denial is apt to require heroism. In practice it may mean giving up many or most of the luxuries which I have come to regard as necessities, at least until I have acquired sufficient self-control to use these things without being enslaved by them.”
- Spiritual Direction & Meditation

+ “The saints are, as a matter of fact, much more keenly aware of the gulf between themselves and God than are those who live always on the periphery of sin. As we advance in the interior life it generally becomes less and less necessary for us to stir up in ourselves this feeling of exile and of spiritual need.”
- Spiritual Direction & Meditation

+ “St. Therese of Lisieux wisely reminds us that ‘God has no need of our works: He has only need of our love.’ The ideal of the contemplative life is not, however, the exclusion of all work. On the contrary, total inactivity would stultify the interior life just as much as too much activity. The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer. For such a one the whole day long is otium sanctum. His prayer, his reading, his labor all alike give him recreation and rest. One balances the other. Prayer makes it easy to work, work helps him to return with a mind refreshed for prayer.”
-  Spiritual Direction & Meditation

Zinzendorf

+ “In essentials, unity;
in non-essentials, liberty;
and in all things, love. ”

Stories

+ so a new farmer had just bought a bull and he was having trouble getting it to pull a plow. he tried everything he could to train it but nothing was working. one day, as he’s out trying to literally whip the bull into shape, his farmer neighbor (you know, one of those guys who’s perpetually 80) walks by and says ‘you having some trouble with that new bull, eh? here, just lemme handle it.’ so the old-school farmer walks straight into the bull’s pen with a donkey in tow. he takes the donkey and ties it to the bull. and for a while, the donkey and the bull just stare at each other, face to face. then all of a sudden, the bull just starts going about his business, dragging the donkey with it. when the bull went to the pond, the donkey got dragged to the pond and so on. the new famer says ‘man, now this is just cruel. what is all this for?’ and the old farmer replies ‘just watch.’ after about 20 minutes, the donkey got fed up. he turns around and the proceeds to kick the bull in the face for a solid 15 minutes. after that, where ever the donkey went, the bull followed with zero resistance.
moral of the story: is God kicking you in the face?

+ A pastor who had died was walking around heaven with God one day and he said to God, “It’s a Sunday down there and it’d be really cool if You could let me look in on the morning service.” So the pastor and God go down in spirit to the balcony of the church. As the pastor is looking in on the service, he catches a glimpse of the bulletin for the morning and he says to God, “Hey! They’re going to sing my favorite song soon! Can we turn up the audio?” God says in return, “Well, I’m sorry son, but up here we can only hear people’s hearts.” And the preacher couldn’t help but weep as they started to sing the song because even though he could see their mouths moving, all he heard was silence.

+ A two-story house had caught on fire. The family –father, mother, several children– were on their way out when the smallest boy become terrified, tore away from his mother and ran back upstairs. Suddenly he appeared at a smoke-filled window, crying like crazy. His father, outside, shouted, “Jump, son, jump! I’ll catch you.” The boy cried, “But, daddy, I can’t see you.” “I know,” his father called, “I know. But I can see you.”

+ “I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained and the sofa faded. I would have sat on the lawn with my children and not worried about grass stains. I would have never bought anything just because it was practical, wouldn’t show soil or was guaranteed to last a lifetime. When my child kissed me impetuously, I would have never said, “Later. Now get washed up for dinner.” There would have been more I love yous, more I’m sorrys, but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute, look at it and really see it, live it, and never give it back.”
- An Excerpt from Erma Bombeck’s article: If I Had My Life to Live Over Again?

One-liners

+ “…But I was learning something: perhaps… the world was made round so that we do not see too far down the road.”
- Out of Africa

+ “Preach what the gospel says. And when you have to, use words.”
- An old Franciscan saying

+ “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds it.”
- Unknown

+ “When we have the eyes of Christ, we can look into the eyes of those we don’t even like and see the One we love.”
- Unknown

+ “I don’t care what you think of me. Who cares what you think of me? I wanna know what you think of Jesus.”
- Kent Nottingham

+ “Have you ever seen a U-haul behind a hearse?”

+ “I want to be known for the things I stand for, not just the things I stand against.”

+ “The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred-proof grace — of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly.”
- Robert Capon

+ “If we but turn to God, that itself is a gift of God.”
- St. Augustine

+ “Pray as you can; don’t pray as you can’t.”
- Don Chapman

+ “If your sin is small, your savior will be small also. But if your sin is great, then your savior will be great.”
- Charles Spurgeon

+ “A shared meal is the activity most closely tied to the reality of God’s kingdom, just as it is the most basic expression of hospitality.”
- Christine Pohl

Lyrics

+ “A glass can only spill what it contains.”
- mewithoutYou

+ “Break my heart for what breaks Yours, everything I am for the kingdom’s cause.”
- Hillsong United, ‘Hosanna’

+ “I need you like a hurricane:
Thunder crashing, wind, and rain
To tear my walls down,
I’m only yours now.
I need you like burnin’ flame
A wildfire untamed
To burn these walls down
I’m only yours now.

I am Yours and You are mine
You know far better than I
And if destruction’s what I need
Then I’ll receive it Lord from Thee.”
- Hurricane by Jimmy Needham