Look for Beauty

Beauty 0

Try to practice enjoying and seeing the beauty in the things that are around you. Practice doing it for a few minutes at a time until you get into the habit of it. Take a walk, for example — it could be in a busy built-up city. Take the time to notice what is around you. There is always beauty around us. We just don’t always notice it, and we frequently don’t think it is important. It’s the little bits of beauty around us that help to teach us to appreciate life. Take a look around, and I know you will see something of beauty. It may be a bird, a plant in a pot, a building, a child with a smile, or something in a window. There is always something of beauty around us.

In seeing beauty around you, you will appreciate life more, and recognize more the beauty that is within yourself. Appreciating beauty helps you to slow down, and the more beauty you notice, the more beauty you will see. Much of the time we just don’t notice what is around us. We are lost in our thoughts or fail to give any importance or value to the idea of seeing beauty.

— Lorna Byrne, A Message of Hope from the Angels, p. 91

Lies Don’t Get Along with Jesus.

Acceptance, Core Value, God, Love 0

That’s why the demons are afraid. Because Jesus always has something to do with them.

Which is exactly why our demons try to keep us from people who remind us how loved we are. Our demons want nothing to do with the love of God in Christ Jesus because it threatens to obliterate them, and so they try to isolate us and tell us that we are not worthy to be called children of God. And those are lies that Jesus does not abide.

— Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints, p. 87

Work as to the Lord

Core Value, God, Life 0

Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

— Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine, p. 127-128, quoted in Called to Create, by Jordan Raynor, p. 51.

Assisted Prayer

Prayer 0

Every time you pray you are talking directly to God. Regardless of your belief in angels, angels are praying with you at the same time, adding power and strength to your prayer. This is one of the tasks God has given the angels. We never pray alone.

— Lorna Byrne, Stairways to Heaven, p. 236

Come to the Library!

Librarians 0

The library is genius in its usefulness. It can be a different place for each person who walks in. Your library can help you find a job, go vegan, read up on the new medication you’ve been prescribed, or learn a new language. Your librarian can listen to your knock-knock jokes or provide a safe space and helpful resources if there is violence in your home. She or he can give you directions to your aunt’s house, or tell you if a celebrity is alive or dead, or help you figure out how to give your kid “the talk.” All while keeping your ass swimming in books. And movies. And music. And Internet access.

There is no other place where you can go and basically say, “I need help with this area of my life” and someone will respond, “All right, let’s figure this out.” Maybe your mom, but she’s not as good at “going online” as we are. So, please, go discover all the boundless glory awaiting you. And introduce yourself. Otherwise, you’re going to get a nickname based on whatever weird face you make or the thing you watched on YouTube that you didn’t think anyone noticed.

— Annie Spence, Dear Fahrenheit 451, p. 240-241.

Plain Statements of Scripture

God, Universalism 0

The following pages are written under the pressure of a deep conviction that the views generally held as to the future punishment of the ungodly wholly fail to satisfy the plain statements of Holy Scripture. All forms of partial salvation are but so many different ways of saying that evil is in the long run too strong for God. The popular creed has maintained itself on a scriptural basis solely, I believe, by hardening into dogma mere figures of oriental imagery; by mistranslations and misconceptions of the sense of the original (to which our Authorized Version largely contributes); and finally, by completely ignoring a vast body of evidence in favour of the salvation of all men, furnished, as will be shown, by very numerous passages of the New Testament, no less than by the great principles that pervade the teaching of all revelation.

— Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant: Universalism Asserted as the Hope of the Gospel on the Authority of Reason, the Fathers, and Holy Scripture, p. 3

Starting Whole

Children, Core Value 0

Is it possible, since skin is the largest organ of the body, that new babies don’t know the inside from the outside when they first come out? That there is no difference? That they are Möbius strips? This is how we came; wow. Talk about whole.

— Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway, p. 176

Close and Caring

God, Love 0

We will begin to explore the grand mystery of how a kenotic, cruciform and Christlike God can reign — can be present, active and ‘sovereign’ — in the world, when he is neither coercive nor controlling, but nevertheless infinitely close and caring. We’ll notice together how such a God rules, saves and serves by grounding and filling all that is with the power of love — a divine love with a particular content defined as consent and participation.

— Bradley Jersak, A More Christlike God, p. 121