"Fourteenth-century mystic Catherine of Siena is one of three women who have been honored by Catholic Christianity as Doctor of the Church, because of the depth of her writings on the spiritual life. She often began her prayers, “O Divine Madman.” When this brilliant, fiery Italian woman was asked to describe the God of her journey, she whispered, “He is pazzo d’amore, ebro d’amore”—he is crazed with love, drunk with love."
(Brennan Manning. Ruthless Trust)
"You won, this time. But you are as big as you are ever going to get. And I’m still growing."
– Sir Edmund Hillary (to a picture of Mt. Everest after his first unsuccessful summit attempt)
"Human failure is the only sure thing that happens in church."
(Paul Russell)
"Much of my growth in the Christian faith has been provoked from places far outside the Christian church."
(Tony Kriz. Neighbors and Wisemen)
Second Agers are prone to get stuck on “by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread,” (Gen 3:19) rather than “my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory .” (Phil 4:19)
(Leonard Sweet. The Well Played Life)
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
(John Muir)
"When we get faith formidable, we take off our work boots and put on our dancing shoes . Then we begin to rock and roll the world."
(Leonard Sweet. The Well Played Life)
What is more foundational that all this talk about the church suffering from a lack "leadership" and "vision". Those are the easy things....
<blockquoye>"Those who desire holiness must learn and relearn to play with God. God-pleasing and Godplaying replace goal seeking and vision casting. Does your church life revolve around goals? Do you go through a vision-casting process every five years? Or do you seek to be quick to fall on your knees and spring fast on your feet to be the people of God in every walk of life? Participation in God’s nature is the true goal of human life"
(Leonard Sweet. The Well Played Life)
</blockquote>
Right or wrong, and not suggesting that making plans is evil, but for a long long time i have felt the real issue is not lack of vision, nor lack of leadership from people like me, or a lack of leadership toward me from others...
There is something deeper, more guttural we are not addressing with the bows and ribbons we are constantly playing with... Well the bows and ribbons I played with for 15 years..... Anyway, How do you measure transformation? The only thing Jesus said is "by their fruit you will know them." How do we lead, and vision cast a people who lost their "spring" and their "fall"? - that Leonard writes about...
If they have a living "spring", "fall", and "walk" my experience is they have no lack of vision and no need of my leadership.
The book of Collosians may have the only answer. When the people are off track, there is immorality, false teaching, a loss of love for others and for Jesus.... Paul's solution in Colossians was simple... to unfold a greater revelation of the person of Jesus. The only one who gives "springs", fixes "springs", and invented "springs"... no reason to spring without him. Can't help but "spring" with him....
"Jesus didn’t come just to save us from problems we have, but from the problem we are." (Myron S. Augsburger)
"Whereas a First Ager discovers his or her song and learns to sing it in the world, a Second Ager learns to dance with a partner and to make music within a symphony of voices."
(Leonard Sweet. The Well Played Life)
"Exuding a brisk air of professional enthusiasm and a suffocating spirit of hubris, I expostulated so brilliantly on the mystery of God that after one semester, there was no mystery left.
When I heard an elderly and saintly friar in the monastery comment, “The older I get, the less I understand about God,” I assumed that it was his sincere attempt at modesty. Secretly, however, I pitied his shallowness. Looking back now, I shudder at my “profundity"
(Brennan Manning. Ruthless Trust.)
"The treasury of a people’s memory is found in their songs. If we want to teach First Agers to play with God, to play in God’s Garden, to “wake up” and go out in mission into the world for service in the “playing field of life,” then we must teach them the songs of our faith, along with their narratives and metaphors. These are the songs that make the lips quiver and the spine shiver and turn acts of faith into acts of art."
( Leonard Sweet. The Well Played Life)
"Sacred scripture is too important to be left exclusively to biblical scholars. Theology is too vital to be consigned solely to the province of theologians. To explore the depths of the God who invites our trust, we need the artists and mystics."
(Brennan Manning. Ruthless Trust.)
"God has a way to nudge you into life.....To know this, God is at work in the world, He's at work in your life. If you don't see it right now, it's not because he is not doing it, it's because you want it to be something other than it is. And If you relax into this, and let it be what it is, he will lead you into a bigger space than you ever dreamed of, or would ever find on your own. "(Wayne Jacobsen The God Journey Podcast, April 17, 2005))
"Meanwhile there is Jeremiah, and the people like him who keep showing up in our homes and communities and churches, who go beyond the boundaries of what is safe and comfortable, learn new languages, discover alien cultures, brave hostility and misunderstanding, and who have the scars and tell the stories that prove that the life of faith can be lived in every place and among all peoples— must be lived in every place, among all peoples."
-- Eugene Peterson, "Run with the Horses"
For you who walk a different path, differently.
As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
"It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning."
(H.G. Wells, The Time Machine)
Sigh.................. "In crowds the truth is flattened to fit a slogan.... The crowd makes spectators of us, passive in the presence of excellence or beauty. The crowd makes consumers of us, inertly taking in whatever is pushed at us. As spectators and consumers the central and foundational elements of our being human— our ability to create, our drive to excel, our capacity to commune with God— atrophy.
(Eugene Peterson, "Run With the Horses)
Thanks Karl Ingersoll
"Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors , and let each new year find you a better man."
(Benjamin Franklin)
"Entrepreneurs must be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. (Jeff Bezos. Amazon)
"The relationship between grace and law is a central issue for almost anyone involved in religion. Basically, it is the creative tension between religion as requirements and religion as transformation. Is God's favor based on a performance principle (Law)? Or does religion work within an entirely different economy and equation? This is a necessary boxing match, but a match in which grace must win. When it doesn't, religion becomes moralistic, which is merely the ego's need for order and control. I am sorry to say, but this is most garden-variety religion. Real love of God or neighbor is much too dangerous.
In Romans and Galatians, Paul gives us sophisticated studies of the meaning, purpose, and limitations of law. He says its function is just to get us started, but it too often takes over. Yet Paul's brilliant analysis has had little effect on the continued Christian idealization of law, even though he makes it very clear: Laws can only give us information; they cannot give us transformation (Romans 3:20; 7:7-13)
__ Paul says, "Israel was looking for a righteousness derived from the law and yet it failed to achieve the purposes of the law. Why did they fail? Because they relied on being privately good instead of trusting in God for their goodness! In other words, they stumbled over the stumbling stone" (Romans 9:31-32). Law is a necessary stage, but if you stay there, Paul believes, it actually becomes a major obstacle to transformation into love and mercy. Law often frustrates the process of transformation by becoming an end in itself. It inoculates you from the real thing. Paul says that God gave us the law to show us that we can't obey the law! (See Romans 7:7-13 if you don't believe me!) In several contexts, Paul even says that the written law brings death, and only the Spirit can bring life (Romans 2:29, 7:5, 2 Corinthians 3:6). This man is religiously dangerous, but it did not take churches long to domesticate him.
Ironically, until people have had some level of inner God experience, there is no point in asking them to follow the ethical ideals of Jesus. It is largely a waste of time. Indeed, they will not be able to even understand their meaning and purpose. Religious requirements become the source of deeper anxiety. Humans quite simply don't have the power to obey any spiritual law, especially issues like forgiveness of enemies, nonviolence, self-emptying, humble use of power, and so on, except in and through union with God. The Spirit in me awakens the only power that can obey the law or know its true purpose.
(Richard Rohr. Grace and Law, Part I
Sunday, April 12, 2015)
"This is one of my favorite Bible College stories.
He said, "Class you will forget almost everything I will teach you in here. So please remember this: that God spoke to Balaam though his ass, and he has been speaking through asses ever since. So, if God should choose to speak through you, you need not think too highly of yourself."
(Rick Mullins)
"What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use —men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men, men of prayer."
(E.M. Bounds)
"My brother and I were about the same age and of the same upbringing. But whereas I came home from that trip (a Safari in East Africa) lucky to have all my fingers and lots of stories, my brother had spent most of the trip reading a novel about adventures in Africa!
We both had a great time, but only one of us came home with stories to tell (and, obviously, I still do). There are two kinds of people in the world—those who live the adventure, and those who read about others’ adventures. I determined a long time ago that I wasn't going to be someone who only read about the adventures of others. I would live the kind of life others would want to read about."
(Journeys To Significance. Neil Cole)(Journeys To Significance. Neil Cole)
He takes it beyond sentimentality.
"The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom.”
(N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)
"2,000 years ago one man got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if everyone was nice to each other for a change."
(Douglas Adams)
"So, come with me now, down the Way and into the mazes."
(Leonard Sweet. The Well Played Life)
"Not everything we carry is a burden, nor is all we put down a loss."
(Andy Rayner)
