We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.
The Bible is a library of books reflecting how human beings have understood the divine. People at that time believed the gods were with them when they went to war and killed everyone in the village. What you’re reading is someone’s perspective that reflects the time and the place they lived in. It’s not God’s perspective – it’s theirs. And when they say it’s God’s perspective, what they’re telling you is their perspective on God’s perspective. Don’t confuse the two.
But it’s in that disappointment, in that confusion, in that pain – the pain that comes from things not going how I wanted them to – that I find the same thing happening, again and again. I come to the end of myself, to the end of my power, the end of my strength, the end of my understanding, only to find, in that place of powerlessness, a strength and peace that weren’t there before.
This is how you remember God: you bless those who need it the most in the same way that God blessed you when you needed it the most.
Better to have a stomach full of butterflies than to feel like your life is passing you by.
There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.
What does it mean to never be separated from love? Is that how you live every day? In every thought, are you constantly reminded that love is the ground of your being?
We rob ourselves of immeasurable joy when we compare what we do know about ourselves with what we don’t know about someone else.
In every life there is an energy field created because we are energy, giving out energy, creating energy .
This story... blasts to pieces our biases and labels with a declaration that God is on everyone’s side, extending grace and compassion to everyone, especially those we have most strongly decided are not on God’s side.
Your ikigai is a work in progress because you are a work in progress. Knowing your ikigai, then, takes patience and insight, and courage, and honesty.
You explore the possibilities because you can’t steer a parked car.
When in doubt, assume that they’re seeing something that you aren’t.
Great marriages have an ease about them, a back-and-forth nonreactive, nondefensive, open, and ongoing flow in which you never stop talking and figuring it out together.
This participation is important, because Jesus and the prophets lived with an awareness that God has been looking for partners since the beginning, people who will take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways.
When people charge in with great insistence that this is God’s word all the while neglecting the very real humanity of these books, they can inadvertently rob these writings of their sacred power. All because of starting in the wrong place. You start with the human. You ask those questions, you enter there, you direct your energies to understanding why these people wrote these books. Because whatever divine you find in it, you find the divine through and in the human, not around it.
The scorecard is rooted in resentment, and the space between you is highly responsive to resentment. The scorecard is lethal because its rooted in fear – fear that we’re on our own, that we’re not going to be taken care of, that we’re not going to get what we need... In order to get rid of scorecard, you have to choose to act in love instead of fear. To get rid of your scorecard, someone has to move toward the other first.
Arguing about how it literally happened can be an easy way to avoid facing the people in your life you need to forgive. For the people who first heard this story, the story would have had a provocative, unsettling effect. The Assyrians? The Assyrians were like a huge, gaping, open wound for the Israelites. Bless the Assyrians? The story is extremely subversive because it insists that your enemy may be more open to grace and love than you are.
Wherever you find truth, wherever you discover something new, affirm it, embrace it, enjoy it.
When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.