Richard Rohr said, “If we don’t learn to transform the pain, we’ll transfer it.
Anyone God uses significantly is always deeply wounded.
TO BE GRATEFUL for an unanswered prayer, to give thanks in a state of interior desolation, to trust in the love of God in the face of the marvels, cruel circumstances, obscenities, and commonplaces of life is to whisper a doxology in darkness.
One of life’s greatest paradoxes is that it’s in the crucible of pain and suffering that we become tender.
Christianity is not an ethical code. It is a love affair, a Spirit-filled way of living aimed at making us professional lovers of God and people.
The Trappist monk Thomas Keating once said, “The cross Jesus asked you to carry is yourself. It’s all the pain inflicted on you in your past and all the pain you’ve inflicted on others.” I believe that’s true. My cross suddenly.
Wrong thinking about God and people often begins with a debased image of ourselves.
If the church remains self-righteously aloof from failures, irreligious and immoral people, it cannot enter justified into God’s kingdom. But if it is constantly aware of its guilt and sin, it can live in joyous awareness of forgiveness. The promise has been given to it that anyone who humbles himself will be exalted.9.
Jesus says. “Acknowledge and accept who I want to be for you: a Savior of boundless compassion, infinite patience, unbearable forgiveness, and love that keeps no score of wrongs. Quit projecting onto Me your own feelings about yourself. At this moment your life is a bruised reed, and I will not crush it; a smoldering wick, and I will not quench it. You are in a safe place.
Drinking gave me a rush of confidence, and for a boy hounded by feelings of inadequacy, the buzz was a welcome relief. What was impossible to realize at the time was that I was shooting myself in the head in some strange time warp where the bullet takes many years to finally reach its target.
For His love is never, never, never based on our performance, never conditioned by our moods – of elation or depression. The furious love of God knows no shadow of alteration or change. It is reliable. And always tender. So.
If you took the love of all the best mothers and fathers who have lived in the course of human history, all their goodness, kindness, patience, fidelity, wisdom, tenderness, strength, and love and united all those qualities in a single person, that person’s love would only be a faint shadow of the furious love and mercy in the heart of God the Father addressed to you and me at this moment.
I am convinced that without a gutlevel experience of our profound spiritual emptiness, it is not possible to encounter the living God.
Before I am asked to show compassion toward my brothers and sisters in their suffering, He asks me to accept His compassion in my own life, to be transformed by it, to become caring and compassionate toward myself in my own suffering and sinfulness, in my own hurt, failure and need. The degree of our compassion for others depends upon our capacity for self-acceptance.
I believe that Christianity happens when men and women experience the reckless, raging confidence that comes from knowing the God of Jesus Christ.
The wild, unrestricted love of God is not simply an inspiring idea. When it imposes itself on mind and heart with the stark reality of ontological truth, it determines why and at what time you get up in the morning, how you pass your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, and who you hang with; it affects what breaks your heart, what amazes you, and what makes your heart happy.
Nowhere in the New Testament is the privileged position of turkeys, nobodies, and marginal people on the fringes of society disclosed more dramatically than in Jesus’ ministry of meal sharing. In modern times it is scarcely possible to appreciate the scandal Jesus caused by His table fellowship with sinners.
We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences, but in our simple presence in life.
God’s grace always precedes his call.
In philosophy, the opposite of truth is error; in Scripture, the opposite of truth is a lie.