But this is no fairy tale. Naturally, given that the story involves real people, it’s messy. Also, since it involves God, you get the sense that the story is not so much about how to simply clean up the mess, but how creative you can get with the mess you have. This is what God seems to be up to — creating good, mysterious things out of messes.
— Curt Thompson, M.D., Anatomy of the Soul, p. 141
But how many of us are ready to abandon ourselves “utterly.” It takes courage to make such a surrender, and without the courage born of desperation, many of us balk. What will become of us we wonder if we give our lives utterly to God. We often have images of what a godly life means, and very often it means giving up things that we hold dear. We may have many ideas about God that say “God does not do business,” and so there goes our career. Or we may believe “God does not do sex,” and therefore there goes our love life. Very often our idea of God is otherworldly. We think of God as a monkish sort, disapproving of our involvement in the world. In short, we forget that God made the world and that nothing in it is really foreign to God. We forget that God is worldly.
God does do finances. In fact, turning our finances over to God’s care has often been a route not to poverty but to prosperity. God is an expert at husbanding resources. God is an expert at increasing the worth of what we hold. To involve God with our finances is to ask the source of all abundance to have a hand in our affairs. This is not folly. This is wisdom. But how seldom do we see it that way. For many of us money is somehow “dirty” and not something we think God can attend to. We think that ambition is something to be ashamed of, a secret that we can keep from God. We forget that there is no secret that we can successfully keep from God. God knows our worldly dreams and desires. Is it possible that God can help us to have them? That seems too good to be true. Instead, we act as if any success that we may have achieved has somehow been achieved behind God’s back and that the last thing we want to do is draw God’s attention to our finances. Our finances are nearly as secret as our sexuality. Most people have a hard time talking about God and money or God and sex. There is God, and then there is the rest of it. But where did the rest of it come from, if not also from God?
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 123-124
Some Jesuses should be rejected.
Often times when I meet atheists and we talk about the god they don’t believe in, we quickly discover that I don’t believe in that god either.
So when we hear that a certain person has “rejected Christ,” we should first ask, “Which Christ?”
— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 9
“This is going to take a while” is one of the earmarks of growing faith. Faith unfolds through time. We need faith over and over again, not just once in a great while. Faith must be our constant companion. God must be a partner for us, not merely a spiritual pinch hitter to be called in at the bottom of the ninth. By saying “This is going to take a while,” we begin to acknowledge that life is a process and that we are given what we need to undergo that process. “Not I but the Father doeth the works” begins to become our lived experience. We feel the hand of God acting not only on us but also through us. We begin to have confidence that God’s power will flow where it is needed, that we can ask to be tapped into that power and expect that our request for power will be honored.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 116
Some Christians believe and often repeat that all that matters is whether or not a person is going to heaven. Is that the message? Is that what life is about? Going somewhere else? If that’s the gospel, the good news — if what Jesus does is get people somewhere else — then the central message of the Christian faith has very little to do with this life other than getting you what you need for the next one. Which of course raises the question: Is that the best God can do?
— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 6
This love compels us to question some of the dominant stories that are being told as the Jesus story. A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance of anything better. It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.
— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. viii
To make a man happy as a lark, might be to do him a grievous wrong: to make a man wake, rise, look up, and turn is worth the life and death of the Son of the Eternal.
— George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God, p. 57
To have faith is to have faith in process. God is not finished with us. We are works in progress, and as much as we would like to know the end point of all the growth we are asked to undertake, we often do not see an end point — or any point at all. At any given time, we may be able to sense only a fraction of God’s intention for us.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 102-103
Why should the rich fare differently from other people with respect to the world to come?
Those who ask such a question do not perceive that the difficulty comes precisely because they shall fare like other people, whereas they want to fare as rich people.
— George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God, p. 55
Care is the operative word — infinite, tender care. This is what we doubt and also what we dream of. It is God’s nature to care for us, and it is perhaps human nature to doubt that care. We know all too well the human failings that come to bear when we promise care. We may, as parents, be too tired or too stressed to give our best care. We tend to project these same attributes onto God. We tend to worry that God is tired and God is stressed and that somehow looking out for us is something that has somehow slipped between the cracks.
But God is not tired. God is not stressed. God is the infinite caregiver. Our well-being is God’s priority. We are urged to trust this, to become “as little children.” We are asked to be wholehearted, to go back to a time before we were cynical and doubtful. God wants us to have faith. “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” We are the little children. How do we become the children that we are?
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 97