Deep in our timid hearts is a desire to be loved mildly, nothing more. That way, we retain control, we set the terms, we avoid risk. Our loving God, in His ferocious intensity, will have none of it.
~ Ray Ortlund, pastor and author

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
~ Daniel Boorstin (1914-2004), historian at the University of Chicago


Americans have…a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative. …Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our…fellow Americans use it.
~ Kurt Anderson in “How America Lost Its Mind”, Atlantic Monthly


I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe, emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity.
~ Anthony Kapel Jones, American Commentator


Discipleship is not an offer that man makes to Christ. … When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship


Kichijiro: ‘Where is the place for a weak person in the world we’re in? Why wasn’t I born when there wasn’t any persecution? I would have been a great Christian.’
~ The Martin Scorsese film “Silence”