We Want the Fast Road To Growth God.

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Small Things Are Divine

"Not to be constrained

by the greatest thing,

but to be contained

in the smallest thing,

is divine."

- Anonymous Inscription in a 1640 Flemish Jesuit volume commemorating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Jesuits.

God is Active Everywhere! Ignatius of Lyloia

This line from a poem by the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins captures a central theme of Ignatian spirituality: its insistence that God is at work everywhere—in work, relationships, culture, the arts, the intellectual life, creation itself. As Ignatius put it, all the things in the world are presented to us “so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily.”

Ignatian spirituality places great emphasis on discerning God’s presence in the everyday activities of ordinary life. It sees God as an active God, always at work, inviting us to an ever-deeper walk.

When Debat Fails Use Totalarianism

"Plotted to kill him (Paul).

Enemies of the Gospel cannot defeat it by free and open debate, so they often resort to force, falsehood, murder, and governmental suppression."

- ESV Study Bible

Study note on Acts 19:23

Are You the Best State Soldier?

Does Jesus Christ 

and His Gospel call us to be the best military solider,

or the worst?

- Paul Axton -

Liberal Gospel

He perfectly characterized liberal Christianity as that in which

“A God without wrath

brought men without sin

into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

- Richard Niebuhr The Kingdom of God in America (1937)

More Than Rule Keeping - Image Bearers

In the story Tthe Bible is telling, humans were created for a purpose, ..... and the purpose was not simply "to keep the rules,"..... as you might suppose from innumerable books, sermons, hymns, and prayers. 

Humans were made to be "IMAGE-BEARERS," to reflect the praises of creation back to the Creator and to reflect the Creator's wise and loving stewardship into the world."

- N. T. Wright. The Day The Revolution Began 

Re-Branding Sin

"There was a time when the people who worried about "sin" were impertinent wrongdoers. Today, the wrongdoers aren't worried any more. The people banging on about "sin" are those who think it's someone else's problem.....

Some in the churches, fearful of moral anarchy, have tried to cling to the old rules. Others have switched attention to newer, more fashionable issues, still thumping the pulpit, but now warning against fossil fuels rather than fornication. The older "sins" have been replaced by newer ones; the fierce energy of earlier moralisms has been transferred now to issues like ecology, feminism, and international debt. Others again have thrown over the whole idea, so that self-righteousness - the idea that "our way of life" is superior to "theirs" - is the only sin left."

- N. T. Wright. The Day The Revolution Began.

Regreting Our God Talk?

"Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God."

- George McDonald

Regreting Our God Talk?

"Many good souls will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God."

- George McDonald

It Is Ordaine That We Should Know One Another

"And I think that life itself, and the way we come into the world, is so ordained by the deity that we should know one another.

For everyone comes into this great universe obscure and unknown casually and by degrees, but when he mixes with his fellows and grows to maturity he shines forth, and becomes well-known instead of obscure, and conspicuous instead of unknown."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals.

1st Century Greek Philosopher

UnRuffled Lives Die

"For Sophocles' words,

"Brightly shines brass in use,

but when unused

It groweth dull in time, and mars the house,"

.... are also appropriate to the character of a man, which gets rusty and senile by not mixing in affairs but living in obscurity. For mute inglorious ease, and a sedentary life devoted to leisure, not only injure the body but also the soul: and as hidden waters overshadowed and stagnant get foul because they have no outlet, so the innate powers of unruffled lives, that neither imbibe nor pass on anything, even if they had any useful element in them once, seem to be effete and wasted."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals

Terror Begets Terror

"Those who would gain power through terror, rule through terror."

- Pierre Elliot Trudeau -

FLQ Terrorist Crisis in Quebec.

200 bombings, 7 murders, 2 kidnappings

Buddhism Has desire

"Buddhism often says humanity needs to eliminate human desire. When in fact that pursuit is the human minds total fixation on the human desire to eliminate desire."

- Paul Axton -

Pride is no cure.

'Pride is the human cure for shame which is no cure at all, because pride comes before shame in the wisdom literature."

- Paul Axton

Thank God For Our Infancy

"I acknowledge Thee, Lord of heaven and earth, and praise Thee for my first rudiments of being, and my infancy, whereof I remember nothing..."

- Augustine -

The Confessions of St. Augustine