a collection of quotes for Miss Anna for your time away from home this summer...
These are some words I've shared with others as they have gone on adventures
so I put them together for you as some bread for the journey and as a reminder that I love you so!
Joy in
the Journey
Summer 2015
May the
peace of the Lord
Christ
go with you,
wherever
He may send you,
May He
guide you
through
the wilderness,
protect
you
through
the storm.
May He
bring you
home
rejoicing
at the
wonders
He has
shown you,
May He
bring you
home
rejoicing
once again into our doors.
Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill
you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving
energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope
Romans 15:13 The
Message
The world needs people who will allow
time for God to recreate them, play with them, touch them as an Artist who is
making something beautiful with their lives.
–Don Postema Space for God
This little book is a collection of quotes that I have
gathered in my journal over the years.
My prayer is that they will be an encouragement to you in the next
couple of weeks when you are away from home.
You
will find a lot of quotes about believing in God’s love for us and being
defined by that reality of being a child of God. You will find quotes about listening, playing, delighting and
celebrating. Many of the quotes
have been good reminders that life is not about my performance, but about God’s
grace. Faith is not about me
coming to Him with all my ducks in a row, but it is about running to God no
matter the circumstance. It is more about letting go and trusting God with our
lives rather than trying desperately to hold on to those things that are so
dear to us in our lives.
I
have so much to learn, and many days, I feel that I am re-learning the same
lessons over and over again. I am
hoping that these words will be an encouragement to you over these coming
weeks. I love you to the moon and
back!
Day One- Monday, July 6th
Let
us ask God for the gift he gave to an unforgettable rabbi, Joshua Abraham
Hershel: “Dear Lord, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me, amaze me, awe
me in every crevice of your universe.
Delight me to see how your Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely
in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his, to the Father through the features of
men’s faces. Each day enrapture me
with your marvelous things without number. I do not ask to see the reason for it all, I ask only to
share the wonder of it all.”
Brennan Manning The Ragamuffin Gospel pg. 103
What
a wonderful experience it is when God grants us a moment in which we don’t take
anything for granted, but see the world as though it was invented yesterday….
We should pray for the eyes of children again, when they saw everything for the
first time.
-John
Piper The Pleasures of God pg 92
24-25"These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to
your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundational
words, words to build a life on. If you work these words into your life, you
are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down,
the river flooded, a tornado hit—but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to
the rock. Matthew 7:24-25 The Message
In Matthew 7:24, the idea of building a life out of Christ’s words
is based on one word in the Greek—poieo, which in other translations is
rendered “do.” From the Greek
word, which is a very active word, we get the English word poet. A poet is a
person who takes words and does something with them, makes something personal
and original out of them. Jesus
says, “Be poets. Make something of these
words I’ve spoken to you. Make a life, epic and poetic. And make it
beautiful. Make it a work of
art.” That’s something we can all
do. One well-chosen word at a
time. One stanza of service at a time.
And with our words and deeds, we can leave something beautiful behind in
the lives of others.
-Eugene Peterson Conversations:
The Message with its Translator pg 1497
Day
Two- Tuesday, July 7th
‘I am
someone God so loves’ is an message we’re likely to hear from God in
contemplation. God is so anxious to tell us this that the only time God is
pictured in a hurry in Scripture is when the father ran down the trail to the
prodigal son, ‘threw his arms around him and kissed him.’ - Jan Johnson
One of the tragedies of growing up is that we get used to
things. It has its good side of course, since irritations may cease to be
irritations. But there is immense loss when we get used to the redness of the
rising sun, and the roundness of the moon, and the whiteness of the snow, the
wetness of rain, the blueness of the sky, the buzzing of bumble bees, the
stitching of crickets, the invisibility of wind, the unconscious constancy of
heart and diaphragm, the weirdness of noses and ears, the number of the grains
of sand on a thousand beaches, the never-ceasing crash crash crash of countless
waves, and ten million kingly-clad flowers flourishing and withering in woods
and mountain valleys where no one sees but God…. May we seek a freshness of
vision to look, as though it were the fist time…at the personal handiwork of an
infinitely strong, creative and exuberant Artist who made the earth and the sea
and everything in them…. May you believe that today, this very day, some stroke
is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course you shall understand
with joy as a stroke made by the Architect who calls Himself Alpha and Omega. -John Piper The Pleasures of God pg 95-6
Joy and delight in the Lord are different in
that these states of being are rooted in One who is unchanging and beyond the
fickleness of daily life. Joy is indeed rooted in peace, an active peace that
wiggles and shakes and laughs out loud. Joy is what one sees in the faces of
little ones lost in play. It is precisely this sort of abandon that Jesus holds
out to those who would follow after him. In a letter to the church in Philippi,
St. Paul noted this difference between “feeling” and “being” when he stated he
had learned to be content in any circumstance (Philippians 4:11). These are
great promises for everyone who would follow after Jesus, not just those with
an apparent special measure of God’s grace. “Do not worry about your life,” Jesus
said, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things
(food, drink and clothing) will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:25). - By The Reverend Tony Welty - Kindergarten Chaplain
Day Three- Wednesday, July 8th, 2015
“But
Mr. Author, why do you always write about princesses?”
“Because
every little girl is a princess.”
“You
will make them vain if you tell them that.”
“Not
if they understand what I mean.”
“Then,
what do you mean? What do you mean
by a princess?”
“The
daughter of a King. Very well then, every little girl is a princess and there
would be no need to say anything about it, except that she is always in danger
of forgetting her rank and behaving as if she had grown out of the mud. I have seen little princesses behave
like the children of thieves and lying beggars, and that is why they need to be
told that they are princesses.”
-George
MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin
On May 28, 1972, the Duke
of Windsor, the uncrowned King Edward VIII, died in Paris. The same evening, a television program
rehearsed the main events of his life.
Extracts of earlier films were shown, in which he answered questions
about his upbringing, brief reign and abdication. Recalling his boyhood as Prince of Wales, he said, “My
father (King George V) was a strict disciplinarian. Sometimes when I had done something wrong, he would admonish
me by saying, “My dear boy, you must always remember who you are.” It is my conviction that our Heavenly
Father says the same to us everyday: “My dear child, you must always remember
who you are.”
EVERYDAY THINGS, relationships with other people, daily work, love
of our family — all these may breed saints. . . . Every hour of the day
is holy. — Carlo Carretto
The
Benedictine life . . . simply consists in doing the ordinary things of daily
life carefully and lovingly, with the attention and the reverence that can make
of them a way of prayer, a way to God.
— Esther de Waal
Day
Four- Thursday, July 9th, 2015
Several
years ago, Edward Farrell, a priest from Detroit, went on a two-week summer
vacation to Ireland to visit relatives. His one living uncle was about to
celebrate his eightieth birthday. On the great day, Ed and his uncle got up
early. It was before dawn. They took a walk along the shores of Lake Killarney
and stopped to watch the sunrise. They stood side by side for a full twenty
minutes and then resumed walking. Ed glanced at his uncle and saw that his face
had broken into a broad smile. Ed said, “Uncle Seamus, you look very happy.” “I
am.” Ed asked, “How come?” And his uncle replied, “The Father of Jesus is very
fond of me.”
If
the question were put to you, “Do you honestly believe that God likes you?”—not loves you, because
theologically He must—how would you answer? God loves by necessity of His
nature; without the eternal, interior generation of love, He would cease to be
God. But if you could answer, “The Father is very fond of me,” there would come
a relaxedness, a serenity and a compassionate attitude toward yourself that is
a reflection of God’s own tenderness. In Isaiah 49:15, God says: “Does a woman forget
her baby at the breast, or fail to cherish the son of her womb? Yet even if
these forget, I will never forget you” (jb).
-- The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus
-Chapter 1 by Brennan Manning
Jeremiah learned to live persistently toward God because
God had lived persistently toward him.
The laments express the suffering that God’s people experienced during
and after the fall of Jerusalem, the most devastating disaster in their
history. At the very center of
this dark time, and placed at almost the exact center of the lament, is this
verse: “God’s loyal love couldn’t have run out, his merciful love couldn’t have
dried up. They’re created new every morning.
God’s persistence isn’t a dogged repetition of duty. It
has all the surprise and creativity, as well as all the certainly and
regularity, of a new day. Sunrise. When the spontaneous and the certain arrive
at the same time.” -Eugene
Peterson Conversations: The Message with its Translator pg 1261
Day Five- Friday, July 10th,
2015
I
know that when I am most monstrous, I am most in need of love, When my tempers
flare out of bounds it is usually set off by something unimportant which is on
top of a series of events over which I have no control, which have made me
helpless, and thus caused me anguish and frustration. I am not lovable when I am enraged, although it is when I
most need love. One of our
children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been
naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was
an affirmation of love. And I would put my arms around him and hold him very
tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned. So God does with me. I strike out at
him in pain and fear and he holds me under the shadow of his wings. Sometimes he appears to me to be so
unreasonable that I think I cannot live with him, but I know that I cannot live
without him. He is my lover,
father, mother, sister, brother, friend, paramour, companion, my love, my all. – Madeleine L’Engle The Irrational
Season
Choosing joy... I think that joy is much more than a mood. A mood
invades us. We do not choose a mood. We often find ourselves in a happy or
depressed mood without knowing where it comes from. The spiritual life is a
life beyond moods. It is a life in which we choose joy and do not allow
ourselves to become victims of passing feelings of happiness or
depression. I am convinced that we can choose joy. Every moment we can
decide to respond to an event or a person with joy instead of sadness. When we
truly believe that God is life and only life, then nothing need have the power
to draw us into the sad realm of death. To choose joy does not mean to choose
happy feelings or an artificial atmosphere of hilarity. But it does mean
the determination to let whatever takes place bring us one step closer to the
God of life. - Henri Nouwen
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper
work. –Mary Oliver
Day
Six- Saturday, July 11th
Ten
times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of
amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the
wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely
out of attentiveness. –Mary Oliver
One
Sunday, he asked me to sit up close to the pulpit. He wanted me to hear his sermon, he said, and as I listened
to him talk about the beauty of God’s creation and our duty to be awed by it,
all of a sudden I heard him telling the congregation about a little girl who
kept tadpoles in a birdbath so that she could watch over them as they turned
into frogs, and how her care for those creatures was part of God’s care for the
whole world.
It
was as if someone had turned on all the lights- not only to hear myself spoken
of in church, but to hear that my life was part of God’s life, and that
something as ordinary as a tadpole connected the two. My friend’s words changed everything for me. I could no longer see myself or the
least detail of my life in the same way again. When the service was over that day I walked out of it into a
God-enchanted world, where I could not wait to find further clues to heaven on
earth. Every leaf, every ant, every shiny rock called out to me- begging to be
watched, to be listened to, to be handled and examined. I
became a detective of divinity, collecting evidence of God’s genius and
admiring the tracks left for me to follow: locusts shedding their hard bodies
for soft, new winged ones; prickly pods of milkweed spilling silky white hair;
lightning spinning webs of cold fire in the sky, as intricate as the veins in
my own wrist. My friend taught me
to believe that these were all words in the language of God.”
-Barbara Brown Taylor The Preaching Life
Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention. Be
astonished.
Tell about it.
–Mary
Oliver
Day Seven- Sunday, July 12th
Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.
–Mary Oliver
Contemplative prayer:
Jesus, How I love to say your name!
The syllables murmur like a meadow brook.
Thank you for loving me, for wanting to
be with me.
How I long for you to take me away with you!
To new places of adventure.
New places of intimacy. New places of
service.
Protect me from the little foxes that might
destroy our relationship, especially the foxes of complacency and ingratitude.
You have given me so much , and given it all so freely,
Help me to be attentive of every gift, and
appreciative of every gift.
Consume me with your love. May the flame that
burns in you for me,
ignite my heart to burn for you. Forgive me
for the times I have been unresponsive to you,
How that must have hurt you. Grant me a
fuller taste of your love for me
so I might fall more fully in love with you.
Give me a fresh taste of your wine, Jesus. -Eugene Peterson
Prayer…is waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I
am doing. When I am fully alert to whatever or whoever is right in front of me;
when I am electrically aware of the tremendous gift of being alive; when I am
able to give myself wholly to the moment I am in, then I am in prayer. Prayer
is happening, and it is not necessarily something I am doing. God is happening,
and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst. An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor pg 178
Day
Eight- Monday, July 13, 2015- HAPPY 13th!!!!
When Christians
speak of the mystery of the incarnation, this is what they mean: for reasons
beyond anyone’s understanding, God has decided to be made known in flesh. Matter matters to God. The most
ordinary things are drenched in divine possibility.
An Altar in
the World by Barbara Brown Taylor pg 201
The artist
Georgia O’Keeffe, who became famous for her paintings of flowers, explained her
success: “In a way, nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small, we haven’t
time- and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” The practice of paying attention
really does take time. Most of us move so quickly that our surroundings become
no more than the blurred scenery we fly past on our way to somewhere else. We pay attention to the speedometer,
the wristwatch, the cell phone, the list of things to do, all of which feed our
illusion that life is manageable.
Meanwhile, none of them meets the first criterion for reverence, which
is to remind us that we are not gods.
If anything, these devices sustain the illusion that we might yet be
gods- if only we could find some
way to do more faster. Reverence
requires a certain pace. It
requires us to take detours, even side trips, which are not part of the
original plan. An Altar in the
World by Barbara Brown Taylor
pg 24
I have an
adult friend, Irene, who wakes up every morning and says, “Thank you so much,
God, for the wonderful privilege of being Irene.” She’s thrilled by the idea
that no one else in the world gets to be Irene. She knows that being Irene is an
exquisitely precious gift reserved solely for her, and she aims to enjoy it to
the fullest. I find it interesting that her very name means “peace”. Irene is a woman at peace with herself
because she loves being Irene. How
rare this is among adults! Yet all children, given half a chance, instinctively
know they are precious and beautiful.
The Mystery of Children pg 138
Do human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every
minute? –Thorton Wilder Our Town
Day Nine- Tuesday, July 14,
2015
But Jesus came and opened my ears to another
voice that says, “I have molded you with my own hands, and I love what I have
made. I love you with a love that has no limits, because I love you as I am
loved. Do not run away from me.
Come back to me—not once, not twice, but always again. You are my child. How can you ever doubt that I will
embrace you again, hold you against my breast, kiss you and let my hands run against
your hair? I am your God—the God of mercy and compassion, the God of pardon and
love, the God of tenderness and care.
Please do not say that I have given up on you, that I cannot stand you
anymore, that there is no way back.
It is not true. I so much want you to be with me. I so much want you to be close to me. I
know all your thoughts. I hear all your words. I see all your actions and I love you because you are
beautiful, made in my own image, an expression of my most intimate love. Do not judge yourself. Do not condemn yourself. Do not reject yourself. Let my love
touch the deepest, most hidden corners of your heart and reveal to you your own
beauty, a beauty, that you have lost sight of, but which will become visible to
you again in the light of my mercy.
Come, come, let me wipe your tears, and let my mouth come close to your
ear and say to you, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” -Henri Nouwen The Road to Daybreak
Do
more than exist; live! Do more than hear; listen!
Do
more than agree; cooperate! Do more than talk; communicate!
Do
more than spend; invest! Do more than think; create!
Do
more than work; excel! Do more than share; give!
Do
more than consider; commit! Do more than forgive; forget!
Do
more than help; serve! Do more than see; perceive!
Do
more than read; apply! Do more than receive; reciprocate!
Do
more than advise; help! Do more than encourage; inspire!
Do
more than change; improve! Do more than reach; stretch!
Do
more than grow; bloom! And do more than dream; do!
Day
Ten- Wednesday, July 15, 2015
The vitality of God be mine this day
the vitality of the God of life.
The passion of Christ be mine this day
the passion of the Christ of love.
The wakefulness of the Spirit be mine this day
the wakefulness of the Spirit of justice.
The vitality and passion and wakefulness of God be mine
that I may be fully alive this day.
The vitality and passion and wakefulness of God
be mine that I may be fully alive. --Celtic Prayer—
In the many details of this day
Let me be fully alive,
In the handling of food
And the sharing of drink,
In the preparing of work
And the uttering of words,
In the meeting of friends
And the interminglings of relationship
Let me be fully alive to each instant, O God,
Let me be fully alive
-Sounds of the Eternal: a Celtic Psalter
Celebrate God all day, every day. I mean, revel in him! Philippians
4: 4 The Message
Day Eleven- Thursday, July 16,
2015
What each of them might be thought to mean separately is
less important than what they all mean together. At the very least they mean this: LISTEN. Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening… A journey, years
long, has brought each of you through thick and thin to this moment in time as
mine has also brought me. Think
back on that journey. Listen back
to the sounds and sweet airs of your journey that give delight and hurt not and
to those too that give no delight at all and hurt like hell… The music of your
life is subtle and elusive and like no other- not a song with words but a song
without words, a singing, clattering music to gladden the heart or turn the
heart to stone, to haunt you perhaps with echoes of a vaster, farther music of
which it is part. The question is
not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things
because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance
thing through which God cannot speak- even the walk from the house to the garage that you have
walked 10,000 times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a
God who speaks at all anymore. He
speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood
of our selves and our own footsore and sacred journeys. We cannot live our lives constantly
looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and
regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of
the music. Sometimes we avoid
listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear
nothing at all, but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement… ”Be not
afraid, for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” He says he has been with us since each
of our journeys began. LISTEN FOR
HIM. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the
sound of him…
- The
Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner
"The
significance and ultimately-- the quality-- of the work we do is determined by
our understanding of the story in which we are taking part." -Wendell
Berry
And
the theologian Frederick
Buechner tells us that to be called is to find that place where our deep
gladness meets the world’s deep need – the intersection of gladness and need is
what it means to be called.
Day
Twelve- Friday, July 17th, 2015
Toward
the end of his life, Henri Nouwen said that prayer had become for him primarily
a time of “listening to the blessing.” “The real work of prayer,” he said, “is
to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.” That
may sound self-indulgent, he admitted, but not if it meant seeing himself as
the Beloved, a person in whom God had chosen to dwell. The more he listened to that voice, the
less likely he was to judge his worth by how others responded to him or by how
much he achieved. He prayed for
God’s inner presence to express itself in his daily life as he ate and drank,
talked and loved, played and worked.
He sought the radical freedom of an identity anchored in a place beyond
all human praise and blame. I too
have found that prayer means far more than telling God what I want him to
do. Primarily, it means putting
myself in a place where God can “renew my mind”, where I can absorb my new
identity as God’s Beloved, which God insists in mine for the believing.
– Philip Yancey
May God bless you with
discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that
you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger
at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for
justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears
to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that
you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain in to joy.
And may God bless you with
enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so
that you can do what others claim cannot be done. - Franciscan Benediction
Day Thirteen- Saturday, July 18th
Abba, I surrender my will
and my life to you today, without reservation and with humble confidence, for
you are my loving Father. Set me
free from self-consciousness, from anxiety about tomorrow, and from the tyranny
of the approval and disapproval of others, that I may find joy and delight
simply and solely in pleasing you.
May my inner freedom be a compelling sign of your presence, your peace,
your power, and your love. Let
your plan for my life and the lives of all your children gracefully unfold one
day at a time. I love you with all
my heart, and I place all my confidence in you, for you are my Abba. - Ruthless Trust by Brennan
Manning
Trappist monk Basil
Pennington captures this simplicity when he writes,
“A father is delighted
when his little one, leaving off his toys and friends, runs to him and climbs
into his arms. As he holds his little one close to him, he cares little whether
the child is looking around, his attention flitting from one thing to another,
or if he is intent upon his father, or just settling down to sleep. Essentially the child is choosing to be
with his father, confident of the love, the care, the security, that is his in
those arms. Our Centering Prayer
is much like that. We settle down in our Father’s arms, in loving hands. Our mind, our thoughts, our imagination
may flit about here and there; we may even fall asleep; but essentially we are
choosing to remain for this time intimately with our Father, giving ourselves
to him, receiving his love and care, letting him enjoy us as he will. It is very simply prayer. It is very
childlike prayer. It is prayer that opens out to us all the delights of the
Kingdom.
-
from A Glimpse of Jesus by Brennan Manning
Day
Fourteen- Friday, July 24, 2015
…But the fact is, whether of not this method is
adequate for putting a person in contact with the risen Lord, it’s certainly a
sound one both spiritually and theologically, and the method is certainly
conducive to making a person feel the infinite treasures of the love of Christ.
Try it for yourself:
Recall the presence of the risen Lord with you.
Tell him that you believe that he is present to you. Reflect on the fact that he loves and accepts you just as
you are now. Take time out to sense his unconditional love for you as he looks
at you lovingly and humbly. Speak
to Jesus- or just lovingly stay in silence and communicate with him beyond
words.
A soul- deep emphasis on the love of Christ, what
the ancients called “devotion to the heart of Jesus”, so vigorous in the past,
so much on the decline today, would flourish once again if people would
understand that it consists essentially in accepting Jesus Christ as love
incarnate, as the manifestation of the unconditional love of God for us. Anyone
who accepts this truth is bound to experience fruits beyond all expectations in
his or her own prayer life and ministry.
-
from A Glimpse of Jesus by Brennan Manning
Stop.
Pay attention to what is troubling you in your mind, heart, body, and
soul. Welcome Christ in the midst
of all that concerns you.(Welcome Him four times or more until you really
hear.) Let go of your desire for
power and control over the situation, to be right.Let go of your desire for
affection and esteem from others. Let go of your desire for security. Let go of
your desire to change the way things are.
Welcome Christ again. Rest in the
healing power of God.
--Adapted from The Welcoming Prayer by
Father Thomas Keating.
Day Fifteen- Saturday, July 25,
2015
The
problem with basing your understanding of God’s love for you on the
circumstances of your life, apart from the fact that God forbids it, is that
circumstances fluctuate more often than the seasons. Christianity offers no assurances that your life will not at
times be filled with tremendous difficulties and disappointments. Many, if not most people, attribute an
understanding of God with circumstances. They say, “God must not love me
because…My business is not prospering…I’m still not married…My marriage is
terrible… I haven’t been able to get a job… My health is suffering, etc.” God’s love is seen as fluctuating
wildly. There is no security in
that. However, what John says implicitly in this passage is that it is not by
our outer circumstances or by our emotions that we determine whether God loves
us. In essence he says, “Don’t
look there. Appearances and feelings can be deceiving. Look instead on two irrevocable gifts
of God: He has given us his Son (vs. 9, 10, 14) and he has given us His Spirit
(vs. 13). According to John, there
is no other irrefutable and infallible evidence of his love: “This is how God
showed his love among us.” It is in realizing that he has given you his Son and
his Spirit that you are made certain of his love. Good circumstances are no
guarantee of his love just as troubles are no guarantee of his
displeasure. When you are tempted
to look at your circumstances and draw the conclusion, “God doesn’t care about
or love me,” you must fix your eyes instead on these two gifts and find
yourself lost in the wonder that anyone could be so lavish and generous towards
you. No other piece of evidence
can be strong enough to overthrow the testimony of these.
- Disappointment with God by Philip Yancey
The
goal of education and formation for the ministry is continually to recognize
the Lord’s voice, his face and his touch in every person we meet.
–
Henri Nouwen
Day Sixteen- Sunday, July 26,
2015
“Can anything ever separate us from
Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or
calamity or are persecuted or are hungry or cold or in danger or threatened
with death?… No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through
Christ who loved us. And I am convinced that nothing can separate us from his
love.” Romans 8:35-38 New Living Translation
I
don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: The only ones
among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to
serve.
-Albert
Schweitzwer
Never
doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the
world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead
In Psalm 46:8, the psalmist says,
“Attention, all! See the marvels of God!” In other words, “Quit rushing through
the streets long enough to become aware that there is more to life than your
little self-help enterprises.” (-Eugene
Peterson Conversations: The Message with
its Translator pg 825)
Today,
I yield myself to you.
May
your will be my delight today. May your way have perfect sway in me.
May
your love be the pattern of my living. I surrender to you my hopes,
my
dreams, my ambitions. Do with them what you will, when you will, as you will.
I
place into your living care my
family, my friends, my future.
Care
for them with a care that I can never give,
I
release into your hands my need for control, my craving for status, my fear of obscurity.
Eradicate
the evil, purify the good, and establish your kingdom on earth.
-Richard
Foster
Day Seventeen- Monday, July 27, 2015
When the brilliant ethicist John
Kavanaugh went to work for 3 months at
“the house of the dying” in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as
to how best to spend the rest of his life. On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa. She asked, “And what can I do for you?”
Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.
“What
do you want me to pray for?” she asked.
He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the
United States. “Pray that I have
clarity.”
She
said firmly, “No, I will not do that.” When he asked her why, she said,
“Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.” When
Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for,
she laughed and said, “I have never had clarity; what I have always had is
trust. So I will pray that you
will trust God.”
“We
ourselves have known and put our trust in God’s love toward ourselves.” (1 John
4:16). Craving clarity, we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God. Fear of the unknown path stretching
ahead of us destroys childlike trust in the Father’s active goodness and unrestricted
love.
-
Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning
It’s not about making the best with what you’ve been
given. It’s about first recognizing what you’ve been given. Then it’s about
seeing the One who gave it to you. And finally, it’s about the process of
yielding what you’ve been given back to the One who gave it to you in the first
place. It’s not about performing
or overachieving or mastering. It’s about the process of learning to live in
the freedom of knowing that it’s not up to you to do anything. It’s about
God. It’s about having the courage
not to pick up the ball after you’ve dropped it. It’s about growing in your
willingness to let God take care of the ball. It’s about understanding that God
has already provided (through Jesus) a solution – not just for eternity, but
also for everyday.
-
David Thomas and Steven James How to Hit a Curve
Ball, Grill the Perfect Steak & Become a Real Man
Deliver
me, Oh Jesus, from the desire of being loved. Deliver me from the desire of
being extolled. Deliver me, Jesus, from the desire of being honored and
praised, from the desire of being preferred and consulted. Deliver me from the
desire of being approved. Deliver me from the desire of being popular. Deliver
me, Jesus, from the fear of being humiliated, from the fear of being despised,
from the fear of suffering rebukes, from the fear of being stereotyped, from
the fear of being forgotten, wronged, ridiculed, suspected. Deliver me from these things, I pray. – Mother Teresa
