This Sunday’s readings: Psalm 3

Reflections

Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.
~ Bruce Lee (1940-1973), actor, director and martial artist

Know, at the end of the day, following Jesus is not necessarily designed to be safe. Safety is a natural desire but it can keep us from being like Jesus in the midst of an unsafe world.
~ The Art of Neighboring by Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon

Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
~ C.S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters

It seems that genuine Christianity can survive anything but comfort, privilege and ease.
~ Anonymous, 33 AD

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.
~ Epictetus, 135 AD, Stoic Philosopher

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self…. And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one’s self.
~ Søren Kierkegaard

“The essence of sin is disordered love.” Disordered loves means that we often love the less-important things more, and the more-important things less than we ought to, and this wrong prioritization leads to unhappiness and disorder in our lives. … “The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.”
~ Nick Cady, American Pastor, on Augustine’s disordered loves