Keep Blooming

God, Joy, Life, Love, Redemption 0

I still believe in heaven, but I am compelled by the breath of God permeating this love-crafted world and by the whole lot of us who are knocking around, messing up, and grateful for do-overs, mercy, and gentle human contact along the way. Anyone paying attention is painfully aware of the stark injustices that plague our land. I, regrettably, have no easy answers for this. It is not my task to explain or defend God.

My job (and yours) is to keep blooming, with an eye for making the garden as lush as we are able. As we do this slow, daily work, God’s kingdom is made known, right here, right now, to all who live. Escaping earth’s pain and confusion by being beamed into heaven was never God’s holy endgame. The Good News is not that God will save us from reality but that God will redeem it, healing everything bruised and broken – even us.

— Shannan Martin, Counterweights, p. 24-25

Photo: Parc Botanique de Haut Bretagne, France, June 19, 2026

Love What God Loves

God, Life, Love 0

What we get most wrong about God is that God can be pleased or displeased. I was directing a group retreat on Zoom during the pandemic, and one of the retreatants asked, “Well, isn’t God pleased with some things and displeased with other things?”

I said: “We smile and frown, ‘cuz we’re human beings. God doesn’t smile at us … God adores us. And God doesn’t frown, either, ‘cuz God’s too busy adoring us.” God’s whole being says, “There is nothing you can do to make me stop loving you.” We want to be rooted in this loving presence. Find the pony. Feel God’s adoration. Julian of Norwich called it “Oneing.” Gregory of Nyssa described it as “intimacy with God,” where we are granted a taste of our oneness with God, and when we don’t feel it, the taste only serves to galvanize our longing for more. Kabir said, ” When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.” We are invited to love what God loves, which is quite different from doing things that please God. The prayer of our life is to lean toward the God of love and say, “Give me your eyes. Then all we’ll see is glorious.”

— Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging, p. 24

Photo: Mont Saint-Michel, June 17, 2026

The Enchantment of the World

Delight, Joy, Love 0

Love is the enchantment of the world. When we love the world, every grain of it, it shines like transfiguration. Love, as Tolkien said, helps us recover the world, turns everything into a fairy tale. Every leaf, every ray of light. Animals and plants. Mead and good music. The kiss of rain on your skin. The face of a friend and loved one. It all becomes magical. Even the eels.

— Richard Beck, Hunting Magic Eels, p. 233

Photo: Tide coming in, Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, June 17, 2026

Unrelenting and Restorative

God, Grace, Love, Redemption, Universalism 0

Unlike the doctrine of hell, which is never clearly spelled out in the Bible, the unrelenting, restorative love of God – which does not count our sins against us but instead works all things together for good in order not only to redeem people from every tribe, tongue, and nation but also to liberate all of creation – is spelled out in the Bible time and time again. It is arguably the unifying theme of the whole book. Over and over, the people of the Bible are drawn into the unrelenting love of God on the other side of their failures.

— Brian Recker, Hell Bent, p. 106

Photo: Mont Saint-Michel, seen from across the bay, June 20, 2026

For Everybody

God, Love, Universalism 0

Something must break us out of the reward-punishment frame. It is too small and too self-serving. It makes the God of the ever-evolving and expanding universe seem equally small and petty, and it has already shown itself to create far too many small, petty, largely competitive, and happily vengeful humans. Yet, in spite of it all, the universe remains one giant self-revelation of the fabulous nature of God, not a small stage where one slice of the human species can show itself to be a winner or a loser.

Somehow, the loving people I have met all across the world seem to know that if it is love at all, it has to be love for everybody. As soon as you even begin to parcel it out, you are not in the great field of love.

— Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things, p.159

Photo: Étretat, France, June 23, 2026

Don’t Surrender Your Hope.

God, Hope, Love 0

Don’t surrender your hope just yet. Don’t let them take it from you. Bring it with you even as you travel. Tend it even as you leave behind the toxic beliefs and habits and spaces that do not bring flourishing to you or to the world. Your hope – your hope in the goodness and welcome and love of God, you wonderful, stubborn thing – will not disappoint you. You can take a risk on hope again. A longing fulfilled is a tree of life, and Revelation tells us about that tree of life, that its leaves are for the healing of the nations and the renewal of all things. We’re still walking toward Emmaus. Our hope is with us. And soon our eyes will be opened to who was walking us home all along.

— Sarah Bessey, Field Notes for the Wilderness, p. 72

Photo: The Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, June 20, 2026

The Heart of It All

Community, Faith, Love 0

The way you treat other people is the only meaningful expression of your belief system anyway; it is the space where your values are on full display. Theologians and seminary students call this orthopraxy (your actions) as opposed to orthodoxy (your beliefs). Jesus called it the “fruit” of a life: the tangible, visible, feel-able part of human beings that reflects whatever has taken root in their hearts. Most people call it being a person of your word. When it comes to the heart of it all, your religion isn’t what you believe, your religion is how you treat people. The only real theology that’s of worth is relational theology. It exists in no other way that is meaningful to another human being. Whatever you have floating around inside your head or might preach about regarding a God of love is ultimately inconsequential. Your beliefs take the infinite, stratospheric, wonder-filled things of the cosmos and shrink them down into something you can hold in your hand. As we live alongside people, the theoretical and the abstract become tangible, personal realities. Our theological stance is revealed in the small places where our lives rub shoulders with someone else’s. It’s really easy to parrot back that you “love your neighbor” but a far greater challenge to love your actual neighbor when your neighbor is an abject jackass.

— John Pavlovitz, Worth Fighting For, p. 62-63

Photo: Abbaye de Royaumont, France, June 24, 2026

A New Look at Love

Core Value, God, Love 0

The glorious message of Scripture is that we do not have to be perfect for our Maker to love us. All through the great stories, heavenly love is lavished on visibly imperfect people. Scripture asks us to look at Jacob as he really is, to look at ourselves as we really are, and then realize that this is who God loves. God did not love Jacob because he was a cheat, but because he was Jacob. God loves us in our complex isness, and when we get stuck on the image of the totally virtuous and morally perfect person we will never be, we are unable to accept this unqualified love, or to love other people in their rich complexity.

If God can love Jacob – or any single one of us – as we really are, then it is possible for us to turn in love to those who hurt or confuse us. Those we know and those we do not know. And that makes me take a new look at love.

— Madeleine L’Engle, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 194-195

Photo: Étretat, France, June 23, 2026