Whenever I read a book, I always have a highlighter with me to mark what really speaks to me. Nearly all the authors and books mentioned here are in my Bookstore. Here are a few of those. You can use the table here to go to a certain author or scroll down where the quotes are in no particular order:
The glory of God is man fully alive. St. Irenaeus
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive. Gil Bailie
So live your life that uptight Christians doubt your salvation
Rejoice & Laugh & Sing so much that your Christmas parties make pagan parties look like funerals. Steve Brown
Every happening, great or small is a parable whereby God speaks to all of us. And the art of life is to get the message. Malcolm Muggeridge
"The more people you let into your heart, the bigger your heart gets. The more love you give, the more love you have to give. It just keeps growing. P126 of Living the Questions by Carolyn Arends
Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly G.K. Chesterton
"The greatest enemy to the movement of Jesus Christ is Christianity" - from The Barbarian Way by Erwin Raphael McManus
Let us ask God for the gift he gave to an unforgettable rabbi, Joshua Abraham Heschel: Dear Lord, grant me the grace of wonder. Surprise me, amaze me, awe me in every crevice of your universe. Delight me to see how your Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his, to the Father through the features of men’s faces. Each day enrapture me with your marvelous things without number. I do not ask to see the reason for it all; I ask only to share the wonder of it all. The Ragamuffin Gospel p 102-103 by Brennan Manning
I am going to live until I die…..
I’ll live as well, as deeply, as madly as I can until I die.
Rule number Sixty-Two - You should not take yourself too damn seriously!
Rick Fields from the book Traveling Mercies
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I smoked a lot of dope that year and sat beneath the trees. There was a huge silver maple near my dormitory with big palmate leaves. In March you could look up through the branches and see puzzle pieces of blue sky. Then day by day the bright green leaves opened like fingers, until the canopy had filled in, like carpet in the sky. P 23 Traveling Mercies
Here's to the crazy ones
Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The troublemakers.
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. Apple Computer commercial http://www.apple.com/thinkdifferent/
A prostitute came to me in wretched straits, homeless, sick, unable to buy food for her two-year-old daughter. Through sobs and tears, she told me she had been renting out her daughter— two years old!—to men interested in kinky sex. She made more renting out her daughter for an hour than she could earn on her own in a night. She had to do it, she said, to support her own drug habit. I could hardly bear hearing her sordid story. For one thing, it made me legally liable—I’m required to report cases of child abuse. I had no idea what to say to this woman.
At last I asked if she had ever thought of going to a church for help. I will never forget the look of pure, naive shock that crossed her face. "Church!" she cried. "Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.
What struck me about my friend’s story is that women much like prostitute fled toward Jesus, not away from him. The worse a person felt about herself, the more likely she saw Jesus as a refuge. Has the church lost that gift? Evidently the down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome among his followers. What has happened?11 What's So Amazing About Grace by Philip Yancey
Messy - What drove Jesus' enemies crazy were his criticisms of the "perfect" religious people and his acceptance of the imperfect nonreligious people. P12-13
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Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of the spiritual life begins where we are now in the mess of our lives. Accepting the reality of our broken, flawed lives is the beginning of spirituality not because the spiritual life will remove our flaws but because we let go of seeking perfection and, instead, seek God, the one who is present in the tangledness of our lives. Spirituality is not about being fixed; it is about God's being present in the mess
of our unfixedness. P13
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Our Churches are filled with people who outwardly look contented and at peace but inwardly are crying out for someone to love them.... just as they are - confused, frustrated, often frightened, guilty, and often unable to communicate even within their own families. But the other people in the church look so happy and contented that one seldom has the courage to admit his own deep needs before such a self-sufficient group as the average church meeting appears to be. Kieth Miller P21-22
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All of us tend to seek comfort, to structure predictability, to eliminate the new and different from our experience. The word messy strikes fear into the hearts of the comfortable. According to the comfortable. God does what he always does. "God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow," which they interpret as "stays the same." There are those in the church who honestly believe God is a nice and neat God. One quick
run through the Bible gives you a different picture. The God of the Bible is the master of surprises: frightening clouds of smoke and fire, earthquakes, windstorms and firestorms, donkeys that talk, pillars of salt, oceans splitting apart, using a little boy to kill a giant, the Messiah in swaddling clothes and dying on a cross. No one can follow God and be comfortable for long.P42 & 43
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Nothing makes people in the church more angry than grace. It's ironic: we stumble into a party we weren't invited to and find the uninvited standing at the door making sure no
other uninviteds get in. Then a strange phenomenon occurs: as soon as we are included in the party because of Jesus' irresponsible love, we decide to make grace "more responsible" by becoming self-appointed Kingdom Monitors, guarding the kingdom of God, keeping the riffraff out (which, as I understand it, are who the kingdom of God is supposed to include). P47
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For God so loved the world, that whosoever believes in him will, from that point on, be considered weird by the rest of the world, which means the church should be more like a zoo than a tomb of identical mummies.P80
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The church, by and large, has had a poor record of encouraging freedom. She has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes, that she has made us like ill-taught piano students: we play our songs, but we never really hear them because our main concern is not to make music but to avoid some flub that will get us in dutch.
ROBERT CAPON P87
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Jesus is not repelled by us, no matter how messy we are, regardless of how
incomplete we are. When we recognize that Jesus is not discouraged by our
humanity, is not turned off by our messiness, and simply doggedly pursues us in
the face of it all, what else can we do but give in to His outrageous, indiscriminate
love?
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My life is a mess.
After forty-five years of trying to follow Jesus, I keep losing him in the crowded busyness of my life. I know Jesus is there, somewhere, but it's difficult to make him out in the haze of everyday life.
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a godly person. Yet when I look at the yesterdays of my life, what I see, mostly, is a broken, irregular path littered with mistakes and failure. I have had temporary successes and isolated moments of closeness to God, but I long for the continuing presence of Jesus. Most of the moments of my life seem hopelessly tangled in a web of obligations and distractions.
I want to be a good person. I don't want to fail. I want to learn from my mistakes, rid myself of distractions, and run into the arms of Jesus. Most of the time, however, I feel like I am running away from Jesus into the arms of my own clutteredness.
I want desperately to know God better. I want to be consistent. Right now the only consistency in my life is my inconsistency. Who I want to be and who I am are not very close together. I am not doing well at the living-a-consistent-life thing.
I don't want to be St. John of the Cross or Billy Graham. I just want to be remembered as a person who loved God, who served others more than he served himself, who was trying to grow in maturity and stability. I want to have more victories than defeats, yet here I am, almost sixty, and I fail on a regular basis.
If I were to die today, I would be nervous about what people would say at my funeral. I would be happy if they said things like "He was a nice guy" or "He was occasionally decent" or "Mike wasn't as bad as a lot of people." Unfortunately, eulogies are delivered by people who know the deceased. I know what the consensus would be. "Mike was a mess."
When I was younger, I believed my inconsistency was due to my youth. I believed that age would teach me all I needed to know and that when I was older I would have learned the lessons of life and discovered the secrets of true spirituality.
I am older, a lot older, and the secrets are still secret from me.
I often dream that I am tagging along behind Jesus, longing for him to choose me as one of his disciples. Without warning, he turns around, looks straight into my eyes, and says, "Follow me!" My heart races, and I begin to run toward him when he interrupts with, "Oh, not you; the guy behind you. Sorry."
I have been trying to follow Christ most of my life, and the best I can do is a stumbling, bumbling, clumsy kind of following. I wake up most days with the humiliating awareness that I have no clue where Jesus is. Even though I am a minister, even though I think about Jesus every day, my following is ... uh ... meandering. P 10-11
Misc quotes from Mike Yaconelli
The truly holy people I've met in my life are really interesting people. They're a mix of the most incredible godliness and at the same time, the most unbelievable earthiness. I know a woman who curses like a sailor, but she's the most holy woman I know. She is! I'm not kidding. We've created this image of what holiness looks like that's just nonsense. Good holy people probably drink too much some times, and have colorful language, and there's plenty of room in the Bible to see people like that. We have to see life for what it is, entirely more complicated then simple. Spirituality is not simple; it's complicated. It gets messy sometimes.
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I want to be "dangerous" to a dull and boring religion. I want a faith that is considered "dangerous" by our predictable and monotonous culture.
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The grace of God is dangerous. It's lavish, excessive, outrageous, and
scandalous. God's grace is ridiculously inclusive. Apparently God doesn't care
who He loves. He is not very careful about the people He calls His friends or
the people He calls His church.
We're attempting to convince the world how good Jesus is by how great
we are. This is precisely how Madison Avenue sells toothpaste, automobiles, and
underwear. People don't need any more images of success, wealth, and power;
they're surrounded already. What they need are their sins forgiven. What they
need is healing. What they need is love.
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When people look at the Church and see only impostors, they conclude that Jesus is an impostor. But when they see followers of Jesus who are real, they see a Jesus who is real.
"Ooh," said Susan, "I thought he was a man. Is he -- quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."
"That you will, dearie, and make no mistake," said Mrs. Beaver, "if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else silly."
"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.
"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver, "don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you."
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"Oh, children," said the Lion, "I feel my strength coming back to me. Oh, children, catch me if you can!" He stood for a second, his eyes very bright, his limbs quivering, lashing self with his tail. Then he made a leap high over their heads and landed on the other side of the Table. Laughing, though she didn't know why, Lucy scrambled over it to reach him. Aslan leaped again. A mad chase began. Round and round the hilltop he led them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost catch his tail, now diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws and catching them again, and now stopping unexpectedly so that all three of them rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs. It was such a romp as no one has ever had except in Narnia; and whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind. And the funny thing was that when all three finally lay together panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least bit tired or hungry or thirsty. P107-108
"That's been my cry for fifty years. I want to know that I can do something that will bring about the blessings I desire. To wait for a miracle puts me out of control. I don't like that. I want to believe that if I get it right, my life will work, that God will bless me with whatever I think I need in order to feel joy. "Please, God. You didn't do it for Abraham, but You had special plans for him. In my life, please, let Ishmael live!"
To get started on the New Way, we must change our prayer. "God, I don't know how You can produce the fruit in my heart of a consuming love for You. I seem to find so much more enjoyment in the good things of life, and sometimes in sin, than in knowing You. I like blessings more than I love You. I experience more pleasure in other things than in You. It will take a miracle to change that.
"You tell me the miracle has already happened, that I have a new heart that wants You as my ultimate pleasure. But I don't know how to make that real. I can come to You as I am, like Abraham came to Sarah, as a tired old man. It took a miracle for them to conceive. But You did it. I will trust You for a similar miracle in my life. God, I now cast out Ishmael and his mother. I want no more temptation to return to the old way of making my life work. I want to lead a supernatural life. I come to You as I am. God, let Isaac be born!"
May that be our prayer, as we now look together at what it means to live the New Way.
We're tired of managing life. The Old Way has worn us out. We now believe it's possible to enjoy God, though not as we will in heaven; we also believe that the partial enjoyment of God available to us now far surpasses the complete enjoyment of anything else.
We're ready to come to God, as we are—dripping noses, dirty faces, torn clothes, desperate to meet Him, claiming grace as our only hope, insisting on no timetable for our sovereign God to follow, but trusting that He'll reveal Himself to us because that's what He wants to do. Its what He has promised to do, even at the cost of His Son's ugly, beautiful death. It's the Immanuel Agenda.
...The pressure's off!
It's time to experience our freedom." The Pressure's Off P 154 & 155
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With our almost limitless capacity to deceive ourselves, it's possible (and the possibility has been realized to epidemic proportions) for people to sincerely believe that they're living the Christian life when in fact they're following a highly Christianized version of the Old Way.
Come a little closer
It isn't possible to expose counterfeits of the New Way without getting both deep and personal. For years I've held to an image of myself that made me want to go deep, but not too deep, and to be personally vulnerable, but only to a point. Let me tell you the image.
Since graduate school days, and probably before, I've viewed myself as a shiny red apple sitting in a fruit bowl positioned on the center of a dining-room table. Look at me from a distance and you'll be drawn. The apple is big, there are no visible bruises, and it's well shaped.
Come a little closer—read a book I've written, attend a seminar I'm leading, listen to me teach the Bible—and your impression that the apple is good fruit might be strengthened. You may want to pick it up and take a bite.
If you do, you'll likely enjoy the taste. Have a conversation with me, come to me for spiritual direction, join a small group with me, combine your gifts with mine to develop a ministry—and you might conclude that indeed I'm the juicy, substantial, sweet-tasting apple I appear to be.
But I know. I know what you don't know and what I'm determined to never let you discover. There's a worm in the center. A few more bites, and you'll spit me out. I must keep you from moving too close. To know me much is to like me. To know me fully will reveal how disgusting I really am.
I've been speaking publicly for thirty years. I'm a good speaker. God has gifted me and used me to bless many from behind a pulpit or podium. After I speak, I often hear, "You're so vulnerable, so honest. You let me see that you struggle too, that you don't have it all together."
Those words are said admiringly. I chuckle with a wry inward smile. When I let you see a little of the worm, you're even more drawn to me. But if I let you see it all, you'd never listen to me again. I choose my level of vulnerability. I know what I'm doing. I'm no fool. I know how to survive in the Christian world.
Some reading this self-description would suggest I suffer from a psychological disorder. I'm sure there are a dozen diagnostic labels that could be pinned on me. Others would think more simply, "This guy sure has a self-esteem problem. Sounds like he hates himself." P 43
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Counseling, even Christian counseling, too often tries to relieve self-hatred and to promote self-love. To do that is to work at making the Old Way more comfortable. It involves neither brokenness, the realization that my self-hatred is too weak, nor repentance, a change in my thinking that shifts the focus from how I feel about myself to how I feel about Christ— or, more to the point, how He feels about me. P 44 The Pressure's Off by Larry Crabb
And then, alas, there is the church Christianity; as it currently exists, has done some terrible things to men. When all is said and done, I think most men in the church believe that God put them on the earth to be a good boy. The problem with men, we are told, is that they don’t know how to keep their promises be spiritual leaders, talk to their wives or raise their children. But, if they will try real hard they can reach the lofty summit of becoming.... a nice guy. That’s what we hold up as models of Christian maturity: Really Nice Guys. We don’t smoke, drink, or swear; that’s what makes us men. Now let me ask my male readers: In all your boyhood dreams growing up, did you ever dream of becoming a Nice Guy? (Ladies, was the Prince of your dreams dashing…. or merely nice?) P7 Wild at Heart
Woman is attracted to wildness of man, but then tries to tame him. If so, he will resent her. Wild at heart
The second journey begins when we know we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the morning program. We are aware that we only have a limited amount of time left to accomplish that which is really important—and an awareness illumines for us what really matters, what really counts. This conviction provides a new center. We share the determination of John Henry Newman who, as his second journey comes to a close, heads home, sensing “I have a work to do in England.
For the Christian. this second journey usually occurs between the ages of thirty and sixty and is often accompanied by a second call from the Lord Jesus. The second call invites us to serious reflection the nature and quality of our faith in the gospel of grace, our hope in the new and not yet, and our love for God and people. The second call is a to a deeper, more mature commitment of faith where the naiveté, first fervor, and untested idealism of the morning and the first commitment have been seasoned with pain, rejection, failure, loneliness, and self-knowledge.
The call asks, do you really accept the message that God is head over heals in love with you? I believe that this question is at the core of our ability to mature and grow spiritually. If in our hearts we really don’t believe that God loves us as we are, if we are still tainted by the lie that we can do something to make God love us more, we are rejecting the message of the cross. P165
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Second journeys usually end quietly with a new wisdom and a coming to a true sense of self that releases great power. The wisdom is that of an adult who has regained equilibrium, stabilized, and found fresh purpose and new dreams. It is a wisdom that gives some things up, lets some things die, and accepts human limitations. It is a wisdom that realizes: I cannot expect everyone to understand me fully. It is wisdom that admits the inevitability of old age and death. P164
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It is a wisdom that has faced the pain caused by parents, spouse, family, friends, colleagues, business/associates, and has truly forgiven them and acknowledged with unexpected compassion that these people are neither angels nor devils, only human. P165-165
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