Living Their Dream - But Not Mine

 "The vast majority of us go to our graves without knowing who we are. We on consciously live someone else's life, or at least someone else's expectations for us. This does violence to ourselves, our relationship with God, and ultimately to others."

- Peter Scazzero. Emotionally Healthy  Spirituality

Mankind Will Shake An Unfamiliar Hand, And Find It Wounded

"And those who know the ancient star song
watch with singing for the sign of footprints in the galaxies,
through which the little planet rides
in routine cycles of despair.
But Joy seldom sleeps for long.
And someday, in a lonely moment,mankind will shake an unfamiliar hand,and find it wounded."

- Calvin Miller. The Singer: A Classic Retelling Of Cosmic Conflict

To Become Presence We Risk Absence.

"Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But that is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.” 

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "The Little Prince" 

Dealing With The Insubstantialy Of Me

"A man I know who likes playing the court jester is fond of lamenting: "Life is hard for me because I have to deal with the magnitude of me!" I cite this quip because for all of us the opposite is forever true; we have to deal with the insubstantiality of me. We are not born into this life with a clear sense of who we are, an easy sense of self-worth, a solid sense of security, and a sure conviction that we are wanted, love, and lovable. In biblical terms, we are born anxious."

- Roland Rolheiser. Sacred Fire 

A Life Lie

"A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life lie. A forty-something client told me his vision, formulated by his younger self. "I see myself retired, sitting on a tropical beach, drinking margaritas in the sunshine." That's not a plan. That's a travel poster. After eight margaritas, you're fit only to await the hangover. After three weeks of margarita-filled days, if you have any sense, you're bored stiff and self-disgusted. In a year, or less, you're pathetic. It's just not a sustainable approach to later life."

- Jordan Peterson. 

Deeper Than A Sin Problem?

"The Bible, then, offers and an analysis of the human plight different from the one normally imagine. "Sin" is not just bad in itself. It is the Tell-Tale symptom of a deeper problem; and the biblical story addresses that deeper problem; it includes the sin problem but goes much further. The problem is that humans were made for a particular vocation, which they rejected; that this rejection involves a Turning Away From the Living God to worship idols; that this results in giving to the idols - "forces" within the creation - a power over humans and the world that was rightfully that of a genuine humans; and that this leads to a slavery, which is ultimately the rule of death itself, the corruption and destruction of the good world made by the creator."

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

What Is A Christian

"Christians are people who live at the speed of light—the light of Jesus:"

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

Travelling Without A Book?

"What! 

No star, and you are going out to sea? 

Marching, and you have no music? 

Traveling, and you have no book? 

What! 

No love, and you are going out to live?"

—Ancient French Proverb

How A Church Stays Relevant

"A lot of people look at what will change in the future,” he said. “I look at what’s not going to change. People will still have marriage problems, they’re still going to be lonely, they’re still going to want to know the purpose of life, they still have problems with depression, fear, bitterness, jealousy. They’re human problems. If you’re dealing with personal lives of people you’re always relevant.”

- Rick Warren 

Something Other Than God?

"What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could 'be like gods'—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves...invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

~ C.S Lewis, Mere Christianity

Come Out Of Hiding!

“The psalms are God’s invitation to us to come out of hiding.” 

 - Darrell Winger

Does My Life Matter?

"Let me ask you something. Is what I do back home important?

Does it matter?

I really don’t do much other than working and caring for my family and friends . . . “

Sarayu interrupted him. “Mack, if anything matters then everything matters.

Because you are important, everything you do is important. Every time you forgive, the universe changes; every time you reach out and touch a heart or a life, the world changes; with every kindness and service, seen or unseen my purposes are accomplished and nothing will ever be the same again.”"

(The Shack. William P. Young)

Life Of Normal

"Life is neither particularly exciting or great, nor disastrous or grandly and interestingly tragic. Life is just trundling along, which is why I have been  quiet."
- Commuting To Timbuktu.. Swiss expart used to live in Djenne Mali

Fantasy Life?

"Our lives are controlled by the fantasies we create to explain and justify our inclinations."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure 

Buying Intense Experience?

"I would learn it all again and something else - that the innocence and intensity of childhood comes back only in little unexpected and empirical moments, and that, being a man, I was much too corrupt and superficial, much too enslaved by the safety of stale emotions to be able to remake myself, to submit myself to life. If life has any meaning at all towards the end, it is certainly only in one's ability to draw from the well of memory a satisfying amount of intense experience to contemplate, for the things that are forgotten are only symbols for the parts of us that have already died. 

Part of the middle class tragedy lies in the facility with which intense experience can be synthesized and bought."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey On Two Rivers. 

Dismal Affairs

"I did not like teenage parties. I do not remember them nostalgically. They were dismal affairs. The lights were kept low. That kept self-consciousness to a minimum. The over loud music made conversation and possible. There was little to talk about in any case. There were always a couple of the town psychopaths attending. Everybody drank and smoked too much. A dreary and oppressive sense of aimlessness hungover such occasions, and nothing ever happened (unless you count the time my two quiet classmate drunkenly began to brandish his fully loaded 12 gauge shotgun. Or the time the girl I later married contemptuously insulted someone while he threatened her with a knife, or the time another friend climed a large tree, swung out on a branch, and crashed flat on his back, half dead right beside the campfire we had started at its base, follow precisely one minute later by his half-wit sidekick).

No one knew what the hell they were doing at those parties. Hoping for a cheerleader? Waiting for Godot? (Although the former would have been immediately preferable although cheerleading squads were scarce in our town), the latter was closer to the truth. It would be more romantic, I suppose, to suggest that we would have all jumped at the chance for something more productive, bored out of our skulls as we were. But it's not true. We were all too prematurely cynical and world-weary and leery of responsibility to stick to the debating clubs and air Cadets and school sports that the adults around us try to organize.......

I wanted to be elsewhere. I wasn't the only one. Everyone who eventually left the Fairview I grew up in knew they were leaving by the age of 12. I knew. My wife, who grew up with me on the street our families shared, knew."

- Jordan Peterson. 12 Rules for Life

Heaven Is a Brain Fairytale

 “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

 Stephen William Hawking, 1942 - 2018    

Give Holy Friendship

"Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.” 

~ Eugene Peterson 

Degenerating Into A Money Making Machine

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news” 

― John Muir

Stuff Your Eyes With Wonder

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

― Ray Bradbury