Perspective

Letting Go, Life 0

Perspective will come in retrospect.

We could strain for hours today for the meaning of something that may come in an instant next year.

Let it go.  We can let go of our need to figure things out, to feel in control.

Now is the time to be.  To feel.  To go through it.  To allow things to happen.  To learn.  To let whatever is being worked out in us take its course.

In hindsight, we will know.  It will become clear.  For today, being is enough.  We have been told that all things shall work out for good in our life.  We can trust that to happen, even if we cannot see the place today’s events will hold in the larger picture.

— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go, p. 263

The Radical Difference Between Cynicism and Joy

Joy, Life 0

For me it is amazing to experience daily the radical difference between cynicism and joy.  Cynics seek darkness wherever they go.  They point always to approaching dangers, impure motives, and hidden schemes.  They call trust naive, care romantic, and forgiveness sentimental.  They sneer at enthusiasm, ridicule spiritual fervor, and despise charismatic behavior.  They consider themselves realists who see reality for what it truly is and who are not deceived by “escapist emotions.”  But in belittling God’s joy, their darkness only calls forth more darkness.

People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it.  They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness.  They point each other to flashes of light here and there, and remind each other that they reveal the hidden but real presence of God.  They discover that there are people who heal each other’s wounds, forgive each other’s offenses, share their possessions, foster the spirit of community, celebrate the gifts they have received, and live in constant anticipation of the full manifestation of God’s glory.

Every moment of each day I have the chance to choose between cynicism and joy.  Every thought I have can be cynical or joyful.  Every word I speak can be cynical or joyful.  Every action can be cynical or joyful.  Increasingly I am aware of all these possible choices, and increasingly I discover that every choice for joy in turn reveals more joy and offers more reason to make life a true celebration in the house of the Father.

— Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 117-118

Accountability

Forgiveness, Letting Go, Life, Relationships 0

Stop making excuses for other people.

Stop making excuses for ourselves.

While it is our goal to develop compassion and achieve forgiveness, acceptance, and love, it is also our goal to accept reality and hold people accountable for their behavior.  We can also hold ourselves accountable for our own behavior, and, at the same time, have compassion and understanding for ourselves.

— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go, p. 260

Revisioning Work

Joy, Life 0

One problem with the word work is that it has come to be equated with drudgery, and is considered degrading.  Now some work is drudgery, though it is not always degrading.  Vacuuming the house or scrubbing out the refrigerator is drudgery for me, though I find it in no way degrading.  And that it is drudgery is lack in me.  I enjoy the results and so I should enjoy producing the results.  I suspect that it is not the work itself which is the problem, but that it is taking me from other work, such as whatever manuscript I am currently working on.  Drudgery is not what work is meant to be.  Our work should be our play.  If we watch a child at play for a few minutes, “seriously” at play, we see that all his energies are concentrated on it.  He is working very hard at it.  And that is how the artist works, although the artist may be conscious of discipline while the child simply experiences it.

— Madeleine L’Engle, Sold Into Egypt, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 235-236

Rejoice

Joy, Life 0

Rejoice in the abundance of being able to awaken each morning and experience a new day.  Be glad to be alive, to be healthy, to have friends, to be creative, to be a living example of the joy of living.  Live your highest awareness.  Enjoy your transformational process.

— Louise L. Hay, You Can Heal Your Life, p. 121

Making Sense

Life 0

Could it be that our lives actually make sense, every part — the good and the bad?  Those deep yearnings that catch us by surprise when we hear a certain song on the radio, or watch our children when they aren’t aware of being watched, are telling us something that is  truer about life than the Message of the Arrows.  It seems too good to be true, which ought to raise even deeper suspicions that it is true.  As Chesterton recounts in Orthodoxy, he “had always believed that the world involved magic:  now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. . . .  I had always felt life first as a story; and if there is a story there is a storyteller.”

— Brent Curtis and John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 44-45

Suspect God.

God, Life 0

If I told anybody what I sensed might be happening here, they’d laugh.

So let them laugh.  Finding God in the ordinary is a way of seeing the world.  It’s a willingness to suspect God when no other fingerprints match.  When we encounter the sublime, terrible, inexplicable, we can stop silent in our tracks and whisper the words of Jacob as he awoke from his ladder dream:  “Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it.”   Or we can shrug it off as a weird coincidence.

— David Anderson, Breakfast Epiphanies, p. 153

Joy Is Essential.

Joy, Life 0

Are you beginning to see now how essential joy is?

Because we live in a world at war.  Because the enemy is relentless.  Because we are “hard pressed on every side” (2 Corinthians 4:8).  For these very reasons we need joy.  Lots and lots of joy.  Bucketfuls.  Wagonloads.  Joy can counter the effect of all this unrelenting other stuff.  Without it we’ll get drained from the battle, sucked dry.  We won’t have anything to draw upon.  No inner reserves.  We’ll waste away.  Throw in the towel.  Or we’ll fall into an addiction because we are absolutely starved for joy.

— John Eldredge, Walking With God, p. 114

Life Is Story.

Life, Story 0

The deepest convictions of our heart are formed by stories and reside there in the images and emotions of story. . . .

Life is not a list of propositions, it is a series of dramatic scenes.  As Eugene Peterson said, “We live in narrative, we live in story.  Existence has a story shape to it.  We have a beginning and an end, we have a plot, we have characters.”  Story is the language of the heart.  Our souls speak not in the naked facts of mathematics or the abstract propositions of systematic theology; they speak the images and emotions of story.  Contrast your enthusiasm for studying a textbook with the offer to go to a movie, read a novel, or listen to the stories of someone else’s life.  Elie Wiesel suggests that “God created man because he loves stories.”  So if we’re going to find the answer to the riddle of the earth — and of our own existence — we’ll find it in story.

— Brent Curtis and John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 38-40