“Live your life in such a way that you neither hide nor have a wish to display your life to people.”

- Leo Tolstoy

Purpose of Life

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

 Ralph Waldo Emerson

Function of Mankind

 The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Jack London

Deep is preferred

“Choose love not in the shallows
but in the deep.”

― Christina Rossetti

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” - Jamie Anderson

Life

"People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Joseph Campbell

Sequence: Repentance then Forgiveness or Forgiveness then Repentance?

"The saved sinner is prostrate in adoration, lost in wonder and praise. He knows repentance is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven. It serves as an expression of gratitude rather than an effort to earn forgiveness. Thus the sequence of forgiveness and then repentance, rather than repentance and then forgiveness, is crucial for understanding the gospel of grace."


Brennan Manning "The Ragamuffin Gospel”

Grace - no one is keeping score!

Grace cannot prevail … until our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed.

Robert Farrar Capon

C.S. Lewis' reflections on Devotions

“I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

C.S. Lewis

Scandalous Grace

I love the scandalous grace Jesus sets forth in his provocative parable of the vineyard workers. Everybody got paid a day's wage. Everybody.

The vineyard owner was more interested in giving people what they need than paying people what they earned. God is like that. Jesus said so.

Brian Zahnd

For those who wonder if God the Father at the core is unpredictable

God is like Jesus.
God has always been like Jesus.
There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus.
We haven’t always known this—
But now we do.

Brian Zahnd

Faith and Acceptance

"Faith is not a gimmick we can use to ace somebody who's basically against us into being favorable to us. You have to grant me it's trust in a relationship with someone who's already accepted us. Okay?"

Robert Farrar Capon

Christ's Death on the Cross wasn’t to satisfy God but instead to change our minds about how we perceive Him

Christ is a divine offering to humankind, not a human offering to God. – Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Instead of us bringing a sacrifice to God to appease him, through the cross God brings a sacrifice to us to reconcile us. – Derek Flood

Tolkien on Food and Cheer

"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." — J.R.R. Tolkien

What really is the Good News?

The gospel is not the news that we can receive Jesus into our lives; the gospel is the news that Jesus has received us into His.

C. Baxter Kruger

What the World Needs

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.

—Howard Thurman

The most important idea to ever grasp

“And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.” 
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

"the opposite of sin is faith, and never virtue"
Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

This to be is the hardest, but the most important lesson to learn. I am still learning it and I will for the rest of my days.
(Me)

Is there value in avoiding Criticism?

“Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing” ~Aristotle

How to truly help another

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.”

― Benjamin Disraeli

Your story

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you

Maya Angelou