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

Beauty

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

LEO TOLSTOY, The Kreutzer Sonata

The Beginning of Love

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

Thomas Merton

Where's it coming from?

Whatever is done out of fullness increases fullness and whatever is done out of emptiness increases emptiness.

Greg Boyd
Twitter may 2011

Source of Happiness

The most dependable sources of happiness are those that lie at "the intersection of pleasure and meaning"

Tal Ben-Shahar

Suffering and Imagination

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.


Rob Bell

God's Plans

It's not that everything happens as part of God's plan, but the infinitely wise God has a plan for everything that happens.


Gregory Boyd - Twitter Feed - Feb. 2011

People

"When we begin to view people as ideology-carriers rather than human beings, we begin to travel a dark road."

John Ortberg (from his Blog - January 2011)

The questioning friend

My friend is the person who asks the same questions as I (not necessarily the person who arrives at the same conclusions).

C. S. Lewis

Touching people's hearts

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou

Shaped and Fashioned

"We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Beauty

"Beauty is not a luxury. It ennobles our hearts so we can see infinity within ourselves."

-John O'Donohue

Poem/Prayer dealing with Loss

And when your eyes freeze behind the gray window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colors, indigo, red, green and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight.

John O'Donohue

Why hate is not the worst thing in the world, there is something worse

The true opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Hate, bad as it is, at least treats the neighbour as a thou, whereas indifference turns the neighbour into an it, a thing. This is why we may say that there is actually one thing worse than evil itself and that is indifference to evil. In human relations the nadir of morality, the lowest point as far as Christian ethics is concerned, is manifest in the phrase, I couldn't care less.'
- Joseph Fletcher

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
- Rollo May

There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference.

- Juan Montalvo