If we've recently talked at length you know that much of my thought has been centered around this idea of paradox. It’s my belief that when you find yourself lost in the paradoxical teachings of the Christian story that’s when the sound of an old door creaks ajar and you find yourself slowly opening the wardrobe that leads to an entire other world.
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December 17, 2008
December 15, 2008
Newsletter Time!
The moment you've waited all year for... (drumroll sounds) I'm mailing out ministry partner newsletters tomorrow. Holler back if you don't think you're on my list and would like a newsletter.
December 08, 2008
December 06, 2008
December 02, 2008
A letter to JP
I spent Saturday November 22nd in the mountains
to listen to a voice so much deeper, wiser, steady, and truer than any man’s. As
I drove west on highway 40 I was drawn to a stretch of river near Hot Sulfur
Springs CO. I pulled over and stood beside this river, which in this area of
the country appeared more like a small brook. At places along this river I could
have jumped a few rocks and made it to the other side without getting wet. It
was an unimpressive stretch of water that wouldn’t have caught my attention had
it not been for its name and reputation. This was the Colorado River. It was
the same river that powers massive engines which create electricity for most of
southern California and Arizona. What my eyes were drawn to was the same river
that formed the captivating majesty of the Grand Canyon. As I was standing on
the bank of that trickling stream I wouldn’t know that later that same day my
friend and college roommate, Kevin, would tell me of how just a week earlier he
was somehow saved from the power of this river after its class nine rapid
within the Grand Canyon flipped his raft and sent him fighting for his life.
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Words make Worlds...
- "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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- I Want to See
- my civil war (reflections on visiting Indiana during this election)
- Trusting your disgust
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