Reflections

Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.
~ Cornel West, philosopher/social critic

Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, 1918–2008, The Gulag Archipelago

Sometimes, to overcome a hurdle before us, we don’t need to search for new truth or understanding of God so much as we need to live out what we already know.
~Amy Layne Litzelman, worship mentor/teacher

Let us wonder; grace and justice
Join and point to mercy’s store;
When through grace in Christ our trust is,
Justice smiles and asks no more.
~John Newton (1725-1807), Anglican pastor

This Sunday’s readings: Psalm 146:1-10

Reflections

Here’s the paradox. We can fully embrace God’s love only when we recognize how completely unworthy of it we are.
~ Ann Tatlock, Author, The Returning

Legalism says God will love us if we change. The gospel says God will change us because He loves us.
~ Tullian Tchividjian, Pastor/Author

The same God who loves us as we are also loves us too much to leave us as we are. Perhaps because we tend to hold to ideas about God that reflect our own suppositions and fears, more than God’s self-revelation. We reduce God to our own dimensions, ascribing to him our own reactions and responses, especially our own petty kind of love, and so end up believing in a God cast in our own image and likeness.
But the true God, the living God, is entirely “other”: Precisely from this radical otherness derives the inscrutable and transcendent nature of divine love–for which our limited human love is but a distant metaphor. God’s love is much more than our human love simply multiplied and expanded. God’s love for us will ever be mystery; unfathomable, awesome, entirely beyond human expectation.
~ Joseph Langford, co-founder w/Mother Theresa, Missionaries of Charity Fathers

But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God’s love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God.
~ Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

This Sunday’s readings: Hosea 11:1-11