Recipients of God’s Good

Faith, God, Gratitude 0

As we pray affirmatively, our faith strengthens. By declaring ourselves the recipients of God’s good, we are able to allow ourselves to actually receive God’s good. “He has made everything suitable for its time,” we are told by Ecclesiastes 3:11. This assures us that nothing is too good to be true. If something good is coming to pass, it is because it is right and appropriate for it to come to pass. It is a time of harvest. It is a time to celebrate God’s blessings. We can pray, “I accept the abundant blessings of God.” We can pray, “I accept God’s timing in the unfolding of my good.”

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 157-158

Learning to Fail

Forgiveness, God, Growth, Life 0

It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference between them matters: “Stories . . . told with . . . heroes at the centre of them . . . are told to laud the virtues of the heroes — for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can’t, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that’s always fundamentally about God.”

I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God.

— Lauren F. Winner, Still, p. 193-194

The Scandal of the Particular

Acceptance, Faith, Forgiveness, God, Redemption 0

Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions, whether they were prostitutes, drunkards, Samaritans, lepers, Gentiles, tax collectors, or wayward sheep. He ate with outsiders regularly, to the chagrin of the church stalwarts, who always love their version of order over any compassion toward the exceptions. Just the existence of a single mentally challenged or mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of correct thinking as the definition of “salvation.” . . .

Jesus did not seem to teach that one size fits all, but instead that his God adjusts to the vagaries and failures of the moment. This ability to adjust to human disorder and failure is named God’s providence or compassion. Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God’s own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to have with us. Just the Biblical notion of absolute forgiveness, once experienced, should be enough to make us trust and seek and love God.

But we humans have a hard time with the specific, the concrete, the individual, the anecdotal story, which hardly ever fits the universal mold. So we pretend. Maybe that is why we like and need humor, which invariably reveals these inconsistencies. In Franciscan thinking, this specific, individual, concrete thing is always God’s work and God’s continuing choice, precisely in its uniqueness, not in its uniformity. Duns Scotus called it “thisness.” Christians believe that “incarnation” showed itself in one unique specific person, Jesus. It becomes his pattern too, as he leaves the ninety-nine for the one lost sheep (Matthew 18:12-14). Some theologians have called this divine pattern of incarnation “the scandal of the particular.” Our mind, it seems, is more pleased with universals: never-broken, always-applicable rules and patterns that allow us to predict and control things. This is good for science, but lousy for religion.

— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, p. 56-57

Allowing Ourselves to be Blessed

Faith, God, Guidance, Trust 0

Whatever the form God’s good takes, it is up to us to accept it, and to do so we must be openminded. The Psalms tell us, “Truly I direct my steps by all your precepts,” and we must do precisely that. When God shows an intention to expand us, we must be obedient to that intention. As God moves to expand us, we must allow ourselves to be expanded. As God brings us blessings, we must allow ourselves to be blessed. We must accept the goodness that God intends for us. We must not turn aside the generosity that God bears on our behalf. We are told by Deuteronomy 31:6, “It is the Lord your God who goes with you; he will not fail you or forsake you.”

What could be more clear? Despite our fears, God is no Indian giver. God is with us always and not less so when he is abundant to us. This is a promise, one of many promises that Scripture makes to us. We must be openminded enough to accept the promises Scripture offers us. We must be willing to receive the abundant goodness of God.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 156-157

The Divine Dance

God, Prayer 0

Prayer is strikingly intimate. As soon as you take a specific answer to prayer and try to figure out what caused it, you lose God. We simply cannot see the causal connections between our prayers and what happens. But don’t forget this isn’t just true of prayer. All the best things in life have no visible connections. For example, selfless love, love that gets no credit or payback, is completely irrational to our intellectual elites because there is no visible connection between what love gives and what it gets. . . .

The inability to see the connection between cause and effect is intrinsic to the nature of prayer because it is the direct activity of God. Trying to dissect how prayer works is like using a magnifying glass to try to figure out why a woman is beautiful. If you turn God into an object, he has a way of disappearing. We do the same thing when a spouse or a friend consistently treats us like an object. We pull back. . . .

If you are going to enter this divine dance we call prayer, you have to surrender your desire to be in control, to figure out how prayer works. You’ve got to let God take the lead. You have to trust. Then God will delight you, not only with the gift of himself but also with parking places, pajamas, poured milk, and Pathfinders. No one works like him!

— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 128

A Tiny Scrap of Time

God, Growth 0

From deep in the tradition, from The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century text from an unnamed English monk: “You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God.”

The words slap. Busyness is not much of an excuse if it only takes a minute or two to move toward God.

But the monk’s words console, too. For, of time and person, it seems that scraps are all I have to bring forward. That my ways of coming to God these days are all scraps.

— Lauren F. Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, p. 108

Forgiving Jesus

Faith, Forgiveness, God, Healing, Trials, Trust 0

We don’t often know why things have happened the way they have in our lives. What we do know is that we were hurt, and part of that hurt is toward Jesus, because in our hearts we believe he let it happen. Again, this is not the time for sifting theological nuances, but this is why it is so important for you to look at the world the way Jesus did — as a vicious battle with evil. When you understand you have an enemy that has hated your guts ever since you were a child, it will help you not to blame this stuff on God. Anyhow, the facts are it happened, we are hurt that it happened, and part of us believes Jesus should have done something about it and didn’t. That is why we need to “forgive” him. We do so in order that this part of us can draw near him again, and receive his love.

Perhaps part of the fruit of that restoration will be that Jesus will then be able to explain to us why things happened the way they did. This is often the case. But whether we receive this or not, we know we need Jesus far more than we need understanding. And so we forgive — meaning, we release the offense we feel towards him.

— John Eldredge, Beautiful Outlaw, p. 164-165

Serving God

Faith, God, Growth, Guidance 0

I believe serving God means being true to who He made you to be. It means allowing yourself to feel and be cognizant of the God-given desires stirring inside you. He isn’t going to call you to be a doctor if the sight of blood makes you queasy. He isn’t going to ask you to step onto a stage and sing if you’re tone deaf and prone to stage fright. It’s true that God may put us in uncomfortable positions sometimes. But His purpose in those times is for us to grow, not for us to fail.

— Christi Paul, Love Isn’t Supposed to Hurt, p. 90-91

The Last Word

God, Love 0

I know this is not the current version of what is psychologically “correct,” because we all seem to think we need nothing but unconditional love. Any law, correction, rule, or limitation is another word for conditional love. It is interesting to me that very clear passages describing both God’s conditional love and also God’s unconditional love are found in the same Scriptures, like Deuteronomy and John’s Gospel. The only real biblical promise is that unconditional love will have the last word!

— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, p. 33

Why Jesus Came

Faith, God, Healing, Joy, Love, Redemption, Universalism 0

Love is what God is,
love is why Jesus came,
and love is why he continues to come
year after year to person after person. . . .

May you experience this vast,
expansive, infinite, indestructible love
that has been yours all along.
May you discover that this love is as wide
as the sky and as small as the cracks in
your heart no one else knows about.
And may you know,
deep in your bones,
that love wins.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 197-198