Do something today that will bring you joy even if you know you will not do it well. Let go of the idea that you have to be the best at something to do it. Train yourself to crave experience, not perfection.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 139
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, July 1, 2022
It was not just the rich young man who asked Jesus how to be saved. All sorts of people in the gospels got saved before Jesus died on the cross. When Jesus healed, they experienced salvus, God’s salvation. They followed him. Lives were changed, transformed. Disciples did give up riches and goods that they might inherit eternal life. Tax collectors abandoned their jobs and surrendered their social standing to eat with him. Children, slaves, soldiers, peasants, fishermen, farmers, prisoners, the sick, the blind, the lame — when they encountered Jesus, they found salvation, the wholeness, the healing, the oneness with God that had only been the stuff of longing. Every miracle, every act of hospitality, all the bread broken and wine served, everything that Jesus did saved people long before Rome arrested and murdered him.
It was all this loving and healing and saving that got him in trouble with authorities. He was not killed so his death would save people; he was killed because he was already saving them. He threatened a world based in fear, one held in the grip of Roman imperialism, by proving that a community could gather in love, set a table of plenty, and live in peace with a compassionate God. Jesus did at-one-ment long before being nailed to a cross. At-one-ment was the reason the authorities did away with him. No empire can stand if the people it oppresses figure out that reconciliation, love, liberation, and oneness hold more power than the sword. So Rome lynched Jesus: tortured him and hung him on a tree. That is the raw truth under all those sophisticated atonement theories.
Jesus was born a savior, and he saved during his lifetime. “Fear not!” “Peace on earth!” He did not wait around for thirty-three years and suddenly become a savior in an act of ruthless, bloody execution. Indeed, the death was senseless, stupid, shameful, evil. It meant little other than silence without the next act — resurrection — God’s final word that even the most brutal of empires cannot destroy salvus. This is no quid pro quo. Rather, Easter proclaims that God overcoes all oppression and injustice, even the murder of an innocent one. At-one-ment means just that. Through Jesus, all will be renewed, made whole, brought back into oneness, reunited with God. Salvation is not a transaction to get to heaven after death; rather it is an experience of love and beauty and of paradise here and now. No single metaphor, not even one of Paul’s, can truly describe this. We need a prism of stories to begin to understand the cross and a lifetime to experience it.
— Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus, p. 96-98.
Photo: Dunluce Castle, Ireland, July 2001
Human love is largely determined by the attractiveness of the object. When someone is nice, good, not high-maintenance, physically attractive, important, or has a nice personality, we find it much easier to give ourselves to them or to “like” them. That’s just the way we humans operate. We naturally live in what I call the meritocracy of quid pro quo. We must be taught by God and grace how to live in an economy of grace. Divine love is a love that operates in a quite unqualified way, without making distinctions between persons and seemingly without such a thing as personal preference. Anyone who receives divine love feels like God’s favorite in that moment! We don’t even have the capacity to imagine such a notion until we have received it! Divine love is received by surrender instead of any performance principle whatsoever.
— Richard Rohr, Yes, And…, p. 78
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, May 30, 2022
Remember a time when you forgave someone, how freeing that felt. You deserve your mercy as much as anyone else does. Forgive yourself for something today, something you wish you’d done differently. Just let it go. Free yourself from it.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 133
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, May 23, 2022
At one time or another, we all had a version of God that was rigid. But the depth of our own experience tells us that our idea of God wants to be fluid and evolving. As we grow, we learn to steer clear of the wrong God. We “break the jar” and it radically challenges our way of seeing reality. Consequently, a change in our conception of God can transform the character of our culture…. The Tender One has no need to judge, because this God understands.
If our God makes us feel unworthy and in debt, wrong God. If God frightens us, wrong God. If God is endlessly disappointed in us, wrong God. A man I knew, after being fired from his job, said, “It’s a good thing I believe in God, who says, ‘Vengeance will be mine.'” Uh-oh. Wrong God.
— Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language, p.4
Photo: Bluebell Trail, Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, April 4, 2022
I don’t believe our suffering is a premeditated test that forces us to find meaning, but I believe that pain is a present opportunity to choose: a sacred space where we get to decide who we will be and what we will believe and how we will respond. As people of faith, we get up when we fall because we are a people of hope, we accept the descent as an invitation to rise again. The spiritual journey — like the human experience — is not a level, linear path where pitfalls are uniform and where growth is predictable and progress comfortable. It is a messy, meandering, awkward path of stops and starts. It is made of both the falling and the getting back up — and the former is often far easier than the latter.
— John Pavlovitz, Rise: An Authentic Lenten Devotional, p. 1-2
Photo: Sunrise, South Riding, Virginia, March 23, 2022
We can be gracious because we are grateful. We can love because we have been loved.
On the days when I believe, I know all this to be true. On the days when you believe, I hope you’ll know this to be true too. I hope you’ll feel deep within your heart and with every cell of your being that you are held and embraced by the God who made you, the God who redeemed you, and the God who accompanies you through every end and onward to every beginning.
Even on the days when I’m not sure I can believe it wholeheartedly, this is still the story I’m willing to be wrong about.
— Rachel Held Evans, Wholehearted Faith, p. 180-181
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, March 21, 2022
Consider what you’ve learned about yourself through grief: Now you know how strong you are. Now you know what you can bear. Think about this strange gift — being confident in what you are capable of. Go forward with that strength.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 113
Photo: Cooper’s Hawk, South Riding, Virginia, March 14, 2022
Christ Crucified is all the hidden, private, tragic pain of history made public and given over to God. Christ Resurrected is all suffering received, loved, and transformed by an all-caring God. How else could we have any kind of cosmic hope? How else would we not die of sadness for what humanity has done to itself and what we have done to one another?
The cross is the standing statement of what we do to one another and to ourselves. The resurrection is the standing statement of what God does to us in return.
— Richard Rohr, Yes, And…, p. 76
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, March 12, 2022
It can be difficult for those of us living in a culture that prizes earning power above nearly everything else to understand that in the economy of grace, the currency of deserved and undeserved is irrelevant. It is absolutely true that you can’t earn God’s love. But it’s not because you are a helpless wretch whose sin makes it impossible for God to even look at you or because you have done something so grievously wrong that your soul has been permanently stained, as if by spiritual Sharpie. The truth is, you can’t earn God’s love because you already have it. You can’t be any more loved than you are because God’s love has already been freely and abundantly given. You can’t do anything to achieve a greater portion of God’s love because God’s love for you is already unconditional and it is already infinite.
— Rachel Held Evans, Wholehearted Faith, p. 180
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, March 6, 2015