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

Reflections

There is a universal need to exercise some kind of power, or to create for one’s self the appearance of some power, if only temporarily, in the form of intoxication.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, 19th Century German Philosopher

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.
~ Epicurus, 341-270 BC, Greek Philosopher

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
~Robert Jastrow (1925-2008), leading astronomer and planetary physicist

Courage, curiosity, kindness … I like people who stay with the process, not stupidly or with a kind of utter stubbornness, but maybe something akin to it with this notion of commitment. I think a lot of people live dull lives, dull meaning, small. They do little with their life other than sustain themselves and perhaps a few people around them. I think of that as insipid. We know life is dangerous, and for the people who are trying to live a safe life period, well, I’m all for safety, But if all you have in your life is a commitment to that small, safe, insipid life, already, I don’t want to be like you. And I think that sense of those who live a small life often live with a level of–I don’t know how to put it more kindly than this– a sort of dogmatic presumption bound into self-righteousness, that they’re right, and the people they don’t agree with, they’re wrong, and whether that’s over a particular view on sanctification for instance, they know what’s right and they are right, and everybody else is pretty much wrong. That is an insipid, self-righteous life, I just want to go ehh.
~ Dan Allender, Psychologist and Author

This Sunday’s readings: Psalm 33:6-22