The Unboxable Largeness of Life

Growth, Joy, Life 0

The course of a champion requires continual growth. For the person who’s growing, each day is different. Each hour presents new challenges that have to be met with new strategies. If we’re stuck in a rut, we don’t need new strategies; we can live by the same old rules and never change a thing. To joy this is intolerable. Joy requires freshness, newness, stimulation. Joy thrives on the unboxable largeness of life in all its bewildering variety. Depression feeds on sameness, but joy craves a steady diet of fresh, dangerous, wiggling, live game.

— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 82

[Photo: From Dunluce Castle, Northern Ireland, July 2001]

The Value of Appreciation

Core Value, Gratitude, Growth 0

The ultimate issue isn’t whether people deserve your negative thoughts; certainly many people do. The more important point is that they are your thoughts in your head, and you want them to be as beneficial to you as possible.

It’s impossible to appreciate and feel devalued at the same time.

— Steven Stosny, Living and Loving After Betrayal, p. 67

[Photo: Assateague Island, October 24, 2016]

Love of Life

Joy, Life, Love 0

When you approach work or any task with love of life, the task becomes so much easier, you gain more confidence, and start to see the positives in the work you are doing. You realize how much you enjoy your colleagues, or how nice so many of the customers are, or you simply appreciate going home with a paycheck. When you approach work with this love of life you have more mental and physical energy and are able to do a better job. You are open to see and seize opportunities to learn new things or take on a new job. It helps to move you forward in life. People who really love life are frequently not in the most important jobs. They may not need as much as others need in terms of stimulation, or reward, but they often, though, live much more satisfying and happier work lives than those who seek higher status.

— Lorna Byrne, Love from Heaven, p. 112

Photo: Rota, Spain, December 18, 2005

Crushing Guilt

Core Value, Growth, Healing 0

When we are feeling guilty, we withdraw, because we are afraid of doing the same thing over again. We either remove ourselves from the path of life or attack those around us to get away from feeling guilty. In the same way, if we lay guilt on those around us, they will respond either by withdrawing from us or by becoming aggressive back at us. Everyone hates guilt. It is the hot potato we always try to pass on to the people around us. We never want to take responsibility for our guilt, because it just feels bad. It is the destructive illusion that creates, either within or outside us, exactly what it is trying to stop. Our willingness to let go of our guilt allows us to remember our own and everyone’s innocence.

— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 324

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, October 12, 2014

New-Creation Work

Beauty, God, Redemption 0

Evangelism needs to be flanked with new-creation work in the realms of justice and beauty. If we are talking about the victory over evil and the launch of new creation, it won’t make much sense unless we are working for those very things in the lives of the poorest of the poor. If we are talking about Jesus winning the victory over the dark powers and thereby starting the long-awaited revolution, it will be much easier for people to believe it if we are working to show what we mean in art and music, in song and story.

— N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, p. 405

[Photo: Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania, March 17, 2012]

God Isn’t Conflicted.

God, Love, Redemption, Universalism 0

God’s essential unity is destroyed when we assign to him conflicting actions, as though his love demanded one course of action, and his justice another, as though God the Saviour were one person, and God the Judge a wholly different one. Or, again, when we blindly teach that, if his judgments now mean salvation, they at the great day mean endless damnation. God, I repeat, in his “judgments,” in his “fires,” in “death,” in “election,” God in time and in eternity is one and the same God (Heb 13:8), and has, and must have to all eternity, but one unchanging purpose — is and must be for ever God our Saviour.

— Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant, p. 231

[Photo: Schloss Dhaun, Germany, July 2002]

Singing in the Midst of Evil

Faith, God, Life, Trials 0

Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples. Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we can stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new. On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid. To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold’s funeral, that death is not the final word. To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it. And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, still we make our song alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix, p. 201

[Photo: Great Falls, Virginia, June 14, 2013]

Value in Relationships

Compassion, Love, Relationships 0

You cannot criticize, stonewall, nag, manipulate, coerce, or threaten someone into genuinely valuing you. More important, you cannot feel valuable while exerting power over loved ones.

The secret of Power Love lies not in exerting power but in creating value, through interest, compassion, and care.

The self-empowerment that comes from creating value through interest, compassion, and care is its own reward, yet it comes with a significant bonus. The more value we create, the more cooperation and mutuality of giving we are likely to experience in love relationships.

You’ve probably heard the saying: “Living well is the best revenge.” Living well actually means creating more value in your life. Creating more value in your life in general and in your love relationship in particular is the surest way to become the partner you most want to be.

— Steven Stosny, Empowered Love, p. 176

[Photo: Oregon Coast, August 6, 2014]

God’s Joy

God, Love 0

I was brought up and educated to give assent to certain propositions. God is love, for example. You concede “God loves us,” and yet there is this lurking sense that perhaps you aren’t fully part of the “us.” The arms of God reach to embrace, and somehow you feel yourself just outside God’s fingertips.

Then you have no choice but to consider that “God loves me,” yet you spend much of your life unable to shake off what feels like God only embracing you begrudgingly and reluctantly. I suppose, if you insist, God has to love me too. Then who can explain this next moment, when the utter fullness of God rushes in on you — when you completely know the One in whom “you move and live and have your being,” as St. Paul writes. You see, then, that it has been God’s joy to love you all along. And this is completely new.

— Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, p. 25

[Photo: Meadowlark Gardens, Virginia, April 3, 2012]