Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.
Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me.
I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.
The accessibility and effective immortality of actual information is a magnificent phenomenon, a beautiful extension of human consciousness. It is too bad people find so many ways to abuse the internet, but that’s just how things are.
Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.
It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.
I’m amazed at what I have taken for granted. How to truly take in our situation I don’t know, but I wish I had started asking myself that question earlier than I did.
And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.
There are several sources for my appreciation of pastors and the way they are described in this book. One of them is reading history and realizing that they had a profound creative impact on the Middle West and the settlement of the Middle West.
You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with.
Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number, and all the same.
It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.
I don’t know exactly what covetous is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.
If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.
I have always liked the phrase “nursing a grudge ” because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.
Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient.
I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another.
Weary or bitter of bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.
People don’t acknowledge loneliness in themselves, and don’t appreciate its benefits, the reflection and attentiveness that come with it, the deepened acquaintance with oneself.