Sunday November 5, 2023 — Hard Sayings of Jesus: Falling Towers

This Sunday’s readings: Luke 13:1-9

Reflections

Poor God, how often He is blamed for all the suffering in the world. It’s like praising Satan for allowing all the good that happens.
~ E.A. Bucchianeri, author, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own beliefs so that we can dispassionately search for prejudices among them.
~ Peter Singer, 1946- , Australian philosopher, Practical Ethics


A lot of you cared, just not enough.
~ Jay Asher, 1975- , writer/novelist

I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
~ Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989, novelist/dramatist

“The fact is that we have no way of knowing if the person who we think we are is at the core of our being. Are you a decent girl with the potential to someday become an evil monster, or are you an evil monster that thinks it’s a decent girl?”

“Wouldn’t I know which one I was?” “Good God, no. The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.”
~ Derek Landy, 1974- , author/screenwriter

There’s nothing wrong with conceptualization per se; but when we take our opinions about any event to be some kind of absolute truth and fail to see that they are opinions, then we suffer.
~ Charlotte Joko Beck, 1917-2011, teacher/author

A God who could pardon without justice might one of these days condemn without reason.
~ C.H. Spurgeon, 1834-1892, famed London preacher

Sunday October 29, 2023 — Hard Sayings of Jesus: Do Not Judge?

This Sunday’s readings: Matthew 7:1-6

Reflections

Just because they annoy you doesn’t mean they’re wrong!
~ Oscar Auliq-Ice, writer, philanthropist

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

It’s not at all hard to understand a person; it’s only hard to listen without bias.
~ Christopher James Gilbert, 1987- , Musician, Author, Philosopher

You meet Noah after the flood, you think, That brave, faith-filled, visionary man. You meet him before and you’re like, What a nut job.
~ Courtney C. Stevens, Author, The June Boys


God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.
~ Vance Havner, 1901-1986, pastor and evangelist

Jesus instructed us to take the beam out of our own eye before we take the speck out of our brother’s (Matthew 7:5). In this way, He told us that the battle is not only against others, it is also within ourselves. Facing the deeply embedded evil of our own hearts is where the most bitter fighting occurs. It’s like a civil war. Your enemy, your old self, is a dearly beloved friend you really don’t want to kill.
~ Dan Allender, Tremper Longman, Bold Love

The marvel of grace is that we are all inflicted with the same cancer as those we are called to love. We are called to be ophthalmologists-eye doctors who see a disease in the eye of another and are so committed to removing that speck of cancer that we knowingly undergo the same surgery to remove the mass in our own eye in order to remove the disease in the other.
~ Dan Allender, Tremper Longman, Bold Love