The Secular and the Sacred

Life, Prayer 0

In the creation and the incarnation the great God of the universe intertwined the spiritual and the material, wedded the sacred and the secular, sanctified the common and the ordinary.  How astonishing!  How wonderful!

The discovery of God lies in the daily and the ordinary, not in the spectacular and the heroic.  If we cannot find God in the routines of home and shop, then we will not find him at all.  Ours is to be a symphonic piety in which all the activities of work and play and family and worship and sex and sleep are the holy habitats of the eternal.

— Richard J. Foster, Prayer, p. 171

Good Enough

Healing, Letting Go, Life, Peace 0

I made a decision that day.  I was here, I was me, and I was enough in spite of my past, my present, my future, my weaknesses, my foibles, my mistakes, and my humanness.

We’re good, and we’re good enough.  Sometimes we make big mistakes; sometimes we make little mistakes.  But the mistake is what we do, not who we are.  We have a right to be, to be here, and be who we are.  If we’re not certain who we are, we have a right to make that exciting discovery.  And we don’t ever have to let shame tell us any differently.

–Melody Beattie, Beyond Codependency, p. 111

Nobler than Suffering

Healing, Inspiration, Life 0

Integrity and honesty are noble.  Suffering is not required.  In fact, when you suffer, it’s easy to forget about the rest of the world.  Personal suffering tends to obscure our vision beyond our own pain and to cut us off from community….

When people rewrite and heal their limiting belief about suffering, they begin to look outward, not inward.  There would be more focus in the world on helping others and being of service rather than on one’s own wounds or suffering.  People’s attention would not be on keeping a good reputation (as one who suffers and is therefore noble), but connecting with the person next door who could use some assistance.

— Christel Nani, Sacred Choices, p. 208

Up to You

Healing, Life 0

Just like the level of resentment you carry, the amount of suffering you endure is entirely up to you.  Change your limiting beliefs about suffering and the subtle ways you cause yourself to suffer, and I guarantee at least 50 percent of your suffering will disappear.  (And how many martyrs does it take to change that lightbulb?  Absolutely none, because they all just sit in the dark — by their own choice — and quietly suffer.)

— Christel Nani, Sacred Choices, p. 207

Victor or Victim

Life, Love 0

Loss of love is always devastating, but it can also be a time for airing out stuffy inner rooms, reassessing values, starting anew.  Relationships may become stagnant or wither and die, but life and love continue.

— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 204

To-don’t Lists

Joy, Letting Go, Life 0

We need to rid our to-do lists of things that don’t matter, don’t create value, don’t make a difference.  We need to restructure our lives and take more time to do things that bring us joy.  Women need to carve out time for the activities that will create meaningful lives and discard the things that won’t.

— This Is Not the Life I Ordered, by Deborah Collins Stephens, Jackie Speier, Michealene Cristini Risley, and Jan Yanehiro

True Fulfillment

God, Joy, Life 0

How gracious God is; how gentle with His earth-bound children!  Despite my reluctance to follow, little by little He led me deeper into His truth.  How could I know that in committing myself to God’s sovereignty I was embracing the richest love, the purest joys, the truest source of fulfillment the human heart can know?

— Margaret Clarkson, So You’re Single, p. 35

What Faith Sees

God, Joy, Life 0

What does faith see?  For that, we must return, I think, to the moment when we saw by faith for the very first time.  In that moment, we saw differently than we had ever seen before.  We had x-ray vision then.  We were able to see through the things of this world and recognize in them God’s invisible qualities — love, order, patience, enthusiasm — revealed in the world he created for our benefit.  Faith, after all, merely confirms what creation shows us in that first lightning bolt of believing.  We looked at apples, grass, shade and saw provision.  We looked at algebra and saw order.  We looked at our pain and struggles, even our terror, and recognized God’s patience and his amazing gift of free will.

— Patty Kirk, Confessions of an Amateur Believer, p. 55

Little Tests

Forgiveness, God, Life 0

Our life unfolds as if God were showing us a slide show, and each slide is a little test.  God says, “Can you forgive this?”  If the answer is no, God simply moves the slide back for us to view again later.

— Hugh Prather, Spiritual Notes to Myself, p. 18