Co-Creating
A creative God didn’t complete creation, I am convinced, so that we might have the happiness that comes with continuing to co-create it ourselves.
— Joan Chittister, Following the Path, p. 35
Category: God
10 Posts
Not a Traffic Cop
Walking beside others is what we are here to do. That’s why others have gathered. But walking side by side is far different than pushing our specific direction on someone else. If our motive is to express joy about another’s journey, allowing her or him to have what fits for them, we are fulfilling God’s will for us. If, instead, we are directing traffic, we have usurped God’s role in their lives, and it’s time to back off.
— Karen Casey, Let Go Now, p. 77
A Moment of Incarnation
Prayer is a moment of incarnation — God with us. God involved in the details of my life. Another author of an otherwise excellent book on prayer said that prayer was mainly about us being with God and not about God answering our prayers. As an example he mentioned that “mothers in the days of high infant mortality used to pray desperately that their children would not die in infancy. Modern medical techniques have put an end to those prayers in the West.” Maybe. Or maybe modern medical techniques were developed in the West because young mothers in the West were praying for the lives of their children.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 125
Interpreting Jesus
Listen to how someone prays — it will reveal what they really think about Jesus. Does he sound near, or does the prayer make him seem far away, up above the sky somewhere? Does it sound as though Jesus might be someone we are bothering with our requests, someone with far more important things to do? Does he have a sense of humor, or is he always serious? Is it formal, and religious, or “Good morning, Papa”? Do they even sound like they know him? Really, listen to their prayers. Listen to your own.
We interpret Jesus through our brokenness. A painful truth, but also a hopeful truth. Maybe we can open up the doors and windows we didn’t know we closed….
This is actually good news, friends — a fair share of your difficulty with Jesus is simply your own brokenness getting in the way. It’s good news because it enables us to realize that our perceptions may be wrong, that this isn’t what Jesus is like — this is our brokenness talking. And second, healing our brokenness is exactly what Jesus came to do. How did he handle every broken person that ever came to him?
— John Eldredge, Beautiful Outlaw, p. 159-160
A Party
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?
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
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
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
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
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