A Party

God, Love, Universalism 0

Neither son understands that the father’s love was never about any of that. The father’s love cannot be earned, and it cannot be taken away.

It just is.

It’s a party,
a celebration,
an occasion without beginning and without end.

It goes on, well into the night,
and into the next day,
and the next
and the next.
Without any finish in sight.

Your deepest, darkest sins and your shameful secrets are simply irrelevant when it comes to the counterintuitive, ecstatic announcement of the gospel.

So are your goodness, your rightness, your church attendance, and all of the wise, moral, mature decisions you have made and actions you have taken.

It simply doesn’t matter when it comes to the surprising, unexpected declaration that God’s love simply is yours.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 187-188

Who Do We Believe In?

Faith, God, Guidance 0

It takes courage to follow our bliss. We must first convince ourselves that it is permissible. We must have the faith that our will and God’s will can coincide, that doing what we wish and pursuing what we love is all right with God, not counter to his intentions for us. We may discover that we unconsciously believe in a God concept that is lethal to our happiness. We may believe in a stingy God or a capricious God. We may believe in an Indian giver God who dangles the prize before us only to snatch it away. We must sometimes do a little sleuthing to see exactly what kind of God we believe in and whether that God also believes in us. The results of our sleuthing may surprise us.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 153

Like Us

Compassion, Forgiveness, God, Life, Parenting 0

I would say that my deepest spiritual understanding is that God also sees and forgives my smallest detail, even my flickery, prickly, damaged, jealous, vain self, and sees how I get self-righteous and feel either like trash, often, or superior, and like such a scaredy-cat, and God still understands exactly what that feels like. Because God has had the experience of being people, through Jesus.

Jesus had his good days and bad days and stomach viruses. Not to mention that on top of it all, he had a mom who had bad days and good days of her own. She’s like me and Amy, like all of us; she would have been as hormonal, too. And she must have been jealous sometimes of the people Jesus chose to spend time with instead of her. Jealousy is such a toxic virus. “Who are these people? And what do they have that I don’t have?” It’s pretty easy to be deeply selfish when it comes to sharing your child. Even Mary must have been like: “Back off! He’s mine.”

— Anne Lamott, Some Assembly Required, p. 228-229

Love Poems from God

God, Joy 0

I hope a few of these poems will reach in deep enough to cure what separates us from each other, and from the beautiful. I hope you fall into this wine barrel (this book) and crawl out legally drunk, and get arrested for doing something that makes God proud of you, like being too happy.

— Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God, page xii

Healing

Acceptance, God, Healing, Prayer 0

I began to believe that God hears every prayer and that healing is not necessarily a matter of receiving a physical cure. It may mean that you discover, as I did, that you have a great deal more courage in you than you ever knew about.

— Caroline Myss, quoting “Ann,” Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, p. 104

Still the Same

Faith, God, Growth, Joy, Truth 0

If we could get a little perspective, we’d see how absurd it is to hold, on the one hand, that the Gospels are the definitive word on Jesus, while holding, on the other, that he doesn’t behave like that anymore. God gives us his Son, and grounds the record for all time in the four Gospels. This is who Jesus is. Against all other claims, doctrines, accounts, this is Jesus Christ. But then — as many Christians have been led to believe — God changed the rules. “That’s not available to you now.” You can’t reach out to him in faith as did the woman with the issue of blood and be healed by his life as she was. You can’t cry out to him and have him deliver you of a foul spirit. You can’t lean upon his breast in intimacy.

It’s psychotic.

It’s also blasphemy. He is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.

Let’s be honest. What is usually going on — what has proven true in every case I have ever encountered — is something more like this: “I don’t experience Jesus personally, so we must not as a rule be able to experience him personally.” Or, “I don’t experience Jesus like that (his playfulness, generosity, freedom, intimacy), so he mustn’t do that any more.”

— John Eldredge, Beautiful Outlaw, p. 156-157

Freedom

God, Joy, Love 0

There is another dimension to the violent, demanding God, the one people need Jesus to rescue them from. We see it in the words of the older brother, when he says he “never even disobeyed.” You can sense the anxiety in his defense, the paranoid awareness that he believed his father was looking over his shoulder the whole time, waiting and watching to catch him in disobedience. The violent God creates profound worry in people. Tension. Stress. This God is supposed to bring peace, that’s how the pitch goes, but in the end this God can easily produce followers who are paralyzed and catatonic, full of fear. Whatever you do, don’t step out of line or give this God any reason to be displeased, because who knows what will be unleashed.

Jesus frees us from that,
because his kind of love simply does away with fear.
Once again, the words of the father in the story,
the one who joyously, generously declares:
“You are always with me,
and everything I have is yours.”

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 184

Trust

Faith, God, Love, Trials, Trust 0

I brought you out of that prison to bring you into the freedom of love. If you love Me only when I immediately satisfy your desires, your love is merely one more form of self-centeredness. Your love becomes trust only when you choose to believe that I brought you out of something bad to bring you into something good before you experience that something good. Then your love is sustained by confidence in My character, not by enjoyment of current blessings.

— Larry Crabb, God’s Love Letters to You, p. 14

Everything to Gain

Faith, God, Growth, Prayer 0

What do I lose when I have a praying life? Control. Independence. What do I gain? Friendship with God. A quiet heart. The living work of God in the hearts of those I love. The ability to roll back the tide of evil. Essentially, I lose my kingdom and get his. I move from being an independent player to a dependent lover. I move from being an orphan to a child of God.

— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 125-126

Loved One

God, Gratitude, Love 0

Though I cry, this I know: God is always good and I am always loved and eucharisteo has made me my truest self, “full of grace.” Doesn’t eucharisteo rename all God’s children their truest name:

“Loved one.”

Me, my dad, my mama, all the children, all the broken ones, all the world, He sings us safe with the refrain of our name, “Loved one.”

— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts, p. 225