Reflections

Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.
~ Roy T. Bennett

We need to cultivate the courage to be uncomfortable and to teach the people around us how to accept discomfort as a part of growth.
~ Brené Brown, Professor/author/Speaker

The church…is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God’s kingship.
~Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), British theologian and missionary

The gospel is not a set of techniques for making people Christians. Nor is it a set of systematic theological reflections, however important. The gospel is the announcement that Jesus is Lord – Lord of the world, Lord of the cosmos, Lord of the earth … of whales and waterfalls, and of trees and tortoises. And as soon as we get this right we destroy in a stroke the disastrous dichotomy that has existed in people’s minds.
~N. T. Wright, (1948-present), Anglican theologian, former Bishop of Durham

There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.
~ Blaise Pascal, Philosopher / Mathematician, Pensées, (thought #425)

This Sunday’s readings: Acts 16:13-34