The following was a class project for students at Grace Prep Academy in Durango, Colorado. These awesome students spent a week in the city with me last spring which left significant impact on us all. They returned this past November asking if we could spend another week together in order to develop a film as part of a class project.
Their expanding heart for the marginalized coupled with their amazing creativity points to the kind of Kingdom collaboration that humanity is capable of and leaves me hopeful for our future...
The following image has had significant meaning for myself and others the past couple weeks as I've used it to help me consider what I'm heading toward in 2012.
Where do you find yourself in the image?
Perhaps you are standing at the bottom of the steps indecisive having yet to enter into the challenges ahead...
Or maybe you see yourself within the walls safely running around child-like in the forrest on the hill...
Still... Many of us will see ourselves between the two arches... Within the tension of liminal space having left one dimension of life although not yet ready to enter the next.
An interesting image and question to say the least...
What determines where we see ourselves and the ensuing movements that take place in our next season is inevitably impacted by our addictions.
"To the eyes of Christians the incarnation is the irruption of God into human history: an incarnation into littleness and service in the midst of overbearing power exercised by the mighty of this world; an irruption that smells of the stable."
~ Gustavo Gutierrez
This time of year always presents a unique struggle for me. With the NFL playoffs around the corner and college basketball in full swing, I find myself at least on occasion, committed to a television screen. And my ego feels it...
Social scientist, Rene Girard, would say that our culture, not just in sports and entertainment, along with every culture throughout history has been largely based on competition and winning.
Can you feel it? ... The reality that a deep sense of rivalry doesn't just stop at the end of the game? It's actually pervasive throughout our culture and at times even among our closest of friends.
"It becomes so clear to me as I grow older that people who change, and keep changing, are the only people who grow up." -Richard Rohr
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be."
-John Wooden
"Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody. Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody."
- Henri Nouwen
"Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of spirituality begins where we are now in the mess of our lives."
-Mike Yaconelli
"But that doesn’t mean community is easy. For everything in this world tries to pull us away from community, pushes us to choose ourselves over others, to choose independence over interdependence, to choose great things over small things, to choose going fast alone over going far together." -Shane Claiborne
"Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." Albert Einstein
"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Howard Thurman
"A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
-Dr. Martin Luther King
"Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful--- Christian community is the final apologetic."
-Francis Schaefer
"It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools."
Wendell Berry
"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than the particular country in which he was born."
-Francois Fenelon
"Ministry cannot be about maintenance, but it is about gathering, about embrace, about welcoming home all sorts of and conditions of people; home is a place for mother tongue, of basic soul food, of old stories told and treasured, of being at ease, known by name,
belonging without qualifying for membership."
-Walter Brueggemann
"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are
not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to
being the particular poet or particular monk that they are intended to be by
God."
"In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted
to be."
-Thomas Merton
"God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God's been speaking through them ever since. So, if God chooses to speak through you don't think to highly of yourself."
-Rich Mullins
"We must become holy not because we want to feel holy but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us."
Mother Teresa
"I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self."
Henri Nouwen
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