Reflect, Resonate, Reevaluate, Respond

But to deviate from the truth for the sake of some prospect of hope of our own can never be wise, however slight that deviation may be. It is not our judgement of the situation which can show us what is wise, but only the truth of the Word of God. Here alone lies the promise of God’s faithfulness and help. It will always be true that the wisest course for the disciple is always to abide solely by the Word of God in all simplicity.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1906-1945

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
~ Carl Jung, 1875-1961, Psychology and Alchemy

The English word “courage” is derived from the French coeur, which literally means “heart.” And since “heart” has traditionally (and metaphorically) been regarded as the seat of emotion, spirit, and strength of character, the implication of such etymology is clear: courage involves the capacity to bear difficulties without wincing, to dare and be innovative, and to do what is needed regardless of its frightening consequences.
~ Salman Akhtar, 1946- , Indian-American psychoanalyst

Glory [is not] transient but eternal. Not vaporous but weighty. Not fragmented and fleeting, but joy fulfilled and forever. Because whatever glory may be like, it is defined by the presence of God himself, apart from whom there is no good thing.
~ Matthew McCullough, PhD, Vanderbilt University, pastor

This kingdom of God life is not a matter of waking up each morning with a list of chores or an agenda to be tended to, left on our bedside table by the Holy Spirit for us while we slept. We wake up already immersed in a large story of creation and covenant, of Israel and Jesus, the story of Jesus and the stories that Jesus told. We let ourselves be formed by these formative stories, and especially as we listen to the stories that Jesus tells, get a feel for the way he does it, the way he talks, the way he treats people, the Jesus way.
~ Eugene H. Peterson, 1932-2018

_{Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see;
Hail the incarnate Deity
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus, our Emmanuel
~ Charles Wesley}

Reflect, Resonate, Reevaluate, Respond

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
~ Augustine of Hippo

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling ‘darkness’ on the wall of his cell.
~ C. S. Lewis, from The Problem of Pain (1940)

To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
~ Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811-1896, author & abolitionist

Isaiah 9:1-7

The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways employed in our North American culture are conspicuously impersonal: programs, organizations, techniques, and general guidelines, informational, detached from place. In matters of ways and means, the vocabulary of numbers is preferred over names, ideologies crowd out ideas, the gray fog of abstraction absorbs the sharp particularities of the recognizable face and the familiar street.
~ Eugene Peterson, from The Jesus Way

We get our calling wrong when we imagine that God needs us, to be the hero of our own story, rather than Christ. Second, we routinely misdiagnose the problem of our world, underestimating the brokenness of sin and overestimating our ability to fix things. Third, our witness of God often depicts a Lord who is domesticated to serve our causes . Fourth, a justifiable focus on external problems can easily blind us to the depth of our complicity in the pain of the human condition.
~ Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, b 1977, Anglican priest and author

In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there’s no danger that we will confuse God’s work with our own, or God’s glory with our own.
~ Madeleine L’Engle, 1918-2007, from Walking on Water