For the Joy of the Journey

Most of us think we are our thinking, yet almost all thinking is compulsive, repetitive, and habitual. Rohr

Sunday Morning 

Answer me quickly, Lord; my spirit fails 
Do not hide your face from me 
or I will be like those who go down to the pit. 
Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, 
for I have put my trust in you. 
Show me the way I should go, 
for to you I entrust my life. 
Rescue me from my enemies, Lord, 
for I hide myself in you. 
Teach me to do your will, 
for you are my God; 
may your good Spirit lead me on level ground.
Psalm 143:7-10 NIV

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Mental assent

Mental assent means intellectually accepting the Word of God as true – admiring it and agreeing with it-but not allowing it to have an impact on you, so that it doesn’t do any good in your life. In essence, mental assent agrees with God but does not believe in God.

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Cherokee Parable

A grandfather is talking with his grandson. The grandfather says, “In life, there are two wolves inside of us which are always at battle. One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love. The other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed, hatred, and fear.”
The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”
The grandfather replies, “The one you feed.”

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

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Lying

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Frankfurt

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Immigrants

“Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.”

Ronald Regan

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Lament

Opening ourselves to God when we’re in need says that we trust God and want God to accompany us, support us, and befriend us in every way.

We trust those we love most with our deepest fears, doubts, emptiness, and disillusionment. So we love God when we share those vulnerable aspects of our lives with God. Just as a little child in the middle of a temper tantrum can shout “I hate you, Mommy!” only because he knows his outburst will not end their relationship, we can express to God our deep doubts, anger, or frustrations only because we possess an even deeper trust in God’s love…. The fact that we share this pain with God rather than withhold it turns out to be an expression of love. 

Brian McLaren 

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Eros

Modern usage has corrupted the meaning of “erotic” to only mean sexual desire – but it is a profound word, without substitute in the language of the Church.

By eros we mean the love that makes us forget ourselves entirely and run towards the other without any regard for ourselves. Allan Bloom described eros as “love’s mad self-forgetting.” (from Road to Emmaus, Vol. XV, No. 2, Spring, 2014). 

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Personal Impressions

…personal impressions are highly selective. I can only see the world out of my own eyes, but my view is bounded and limited by my experiences. My view is only the smallest of slices of what is going on in the world. 

Richard Beck

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY

If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

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Overthinking

Somewhere between overthinking and underthinking is responsible and responsive thinking. As a Christian who tries to be a thinking Christian I’ve always taken seriously the discipleship of the intellect, the Christian mind, or as Anselm called it “faith seeking understanding.”

Jim Gordon

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Contemplation

It is impossible to shift priorities if we are in a constant, busy, frenetic lifestyle. There has to be that pause, that breath, that waiting, that willingness to be still until we know. Be still and know—but the stillness doesn’t immediately lead to knowing. At first, we have to be still, and then we have to be patient until the knowing comes about.

Barbara Holmes 

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Doubt

I’m not describing atheists, apostates, or “exvangelicals” here. This is how many ordinary Christians feel. Or at least, it’s the water they swim in, the intrusive thought in the back of the mind, the semi-conscious source of inertia they feel when the alarm blares on Sunday morning. American Christians face no Colosseum, but this emotional and intellectual pressure is very real. The doubts add up.

It doesn’t help that doubt is in vogue. Doubt is sexy, and not only in the wider culture. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been told by a pastor or Christian professor that doubt is a sign of spiritual maturity. That faith without doubt is superficial, a mere honeymoon period. That doubt is the flip side of faith, a kind of friend to fidelity. That the presence of doubt is a sign of a healthy theological mind, and its absence—well, you can fill in the rest.

The pro-doubt crowd gets two important things entirely right. First, they want space to ask honest questions. Second, they want to remove the stigma of doubt.

Brad East

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Human Behavior

“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

Viktor Frankl

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True Professional

Edward Said has called the true intellectua: one who pursues their craft not as a profession, working 9-5, but rather for the love of the thing itself.  

A language

“You need a language with which to express things, which at a certain age you felt you could do yourself, and gradually, somehow, it’s like switching from pastel paint to heavy oils.”

Peter Brown

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born to be happy

Solzhenitsyn observed, if “man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die.” And as he pointed out, if such a credo holds, “for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good?” 

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Survivors

Only those who have tried to breathe under water know how important breathing really is, and will never take it for granted again. They are the ones who do not take shipwreck or drowning lightly. They’re the ones who can name “healing” correctly, the ones who know what they have been saved from, and the only ones who develop the patience and humility to ask the right questions of God and of themselves.

Only the survivors know the full terror of the passage, the arms that held them through it all, and the power of the obstacles that were overcome. All they can do is thank God they made it through! For the rest of us it is mere speculation, salvation theories, and “theology.”

Richard Rohr

Believing in God

“To me it comes down to this question: do I choose to believe in a universe that is self created, whose laws are self created, where life is ordered out of nothing, or do I choose to believe in a universe that is an expression of the power, beauty, and will of a God whose origins I cannot explain? Both require a measure of faith. I choose to believe that there is a God whose handiwork is seen in the cosmos, who created the laws that order our universe, and who brought forth life on our planet.”

“I believe in God because I believe God is the best explanation for the universe we live in. I believe in God because I’ve experienced what I believe is God’s presence and my life has been positively affected by my faith. I believe in God because I’m drawn to Jesus, and Jesus believed in God. But I also believe in God because I see the impact faith in God has had on the lives of so many people, and through them, on the world.”

Adam Hamilton

extremes

The far left will always end up in failure because they reject the reality of sin…the far right will fail because they believe they are without it…

Phoenix Preacher 

STILL ON THE JOURNEY