Making Us Good

God, Growth 0

“But if God can do anything he please,” said Evans, “he might as well make us good, and there would be an end of it.”

“That is just what he is doing,” returned Marion. “Perhaps, by giving them perfect health, and everything they wanted, with absolute good temper, and making them very fond of each other besides, God might have provided himself a people he would have had no difficulty in governing, and among whom, in consequence, there would have been no crime and no struggle or suffering. But I have known a dog with more goodness than that would come to. We cannot be good without having consented to be made good. God shows us the good and the bad; urges us to be good; wakes good thoughts and desires in us; helps our spirit with his Spirit, our thought with his thought: but we must yield; we must turn to him; we must consent, yes, try to be made good. If we could become good without trying, it would be a poor goodness: we should not be good, after all; at best, we should only be not bad. God wants us to choose to be good, and so be partakers of his holiness; he would have us lay hold of him. He who has given his Son to suffer for us will make us suffer too, bitterly if needful, that we may repent and turn to him. He would make us as good as good can be, that is, perfectly good; and therefore will rouse us to take the needful hand in the work ourselves — rouse us by discomforts innumerable.

— George MacDonald, The Vicar’s Daughter, chapter 25, quoted in Knowing the Heart of God, p. 286.

The New You

Acceptance, Growth, Life 0

You get it right when you realize that you cannot go back to who you once were. And this is a good thing. You already did that person. Now it is time to be the new you. Now it is time to embrace that person you were who got you here. That person is brave. That person is resilient. That person is complex. That person is deserving. You are deserving.

This is why so many people say in hindsight, Now it all makes sense. It is not because they made one decision that turned out perfectly – that landed them in the room they wanted to stay in for the rest of their lives. It is because they made a series of decisions, and each one led them into a new room. And even when they were sure a room was not where they were supposed to be, or it felt really hard, or they could not imagine it getting better, they did not give up. They realized that they had to keep going forward into the next room and then the next, until they found the one that felt right.

— Sherre Hirsch, Thresholds, p. 183

Battling Demons

Core Value, Faith, God, Redemption 0

Indeed, our sins — hate, fear, greed, jealousy, lust, materialism, pride — can at times take such distinct forms in our lives that we recognize them in the faces of the gargoyles and grotesques that guard our cathedral doors. And these sins join in a chorus — you might even say a legion — of voices locked in an ongoing battle with God to lay claim over our identity, to convince us we belong to them, that they have the right to name us. Where God calls the baptized beloved, demons call her addict, slut, sinner, failure, fat, worthless, faker, screwup. Where God calls her child, the demons beckon with rich, powerful, pretty, important, religious, esteemed, accomplished, right. It is no coincidence that when Satan tempted Jesus after his baptism, he began his entreaties with, “If you are the Son of God . . .” We all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God’s name for us, to believe we are beloved and to believe that is enough.

— Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday, p. 19

Don’t Let Him Get Away With It.

Forgiveness, Letting Go 0

This is the knowledge I would share with you: nursing a grudge only perpetuates the offender’s power over you. He continues to live in your head, reinforcing your frustration, polluting your imagination with thoughts of getting even. Don’t let him get away with that. He may or may not deserve forgiveness, but you deserve better than to waste your energy being angry at him. Letting go is the best revenge. Forgiveness is the identifying marker of the stronger party to the dispute. It is truly a favor you do yourself, not an undeserved gesture to the person who hurt you. Be kind to yourself and forgive.

— Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life, p. 75

The Basic Truth and Basic Fear

Love, Truth 0

If it’s true that there is only one love (with different expressions, not different types), then it could also be true that there is only one fear. Love can express itself in ten thousand ways, but it’s all the same love, so maybe fear can also express itself in ten thousand ways, and it’s all the same fear. Looked at this way, all love is an extension of the basic truth “I am loveable,” and all fear is a projection of the basic fear “I am not loveable.”

— Robert Holden, PhD, Loveability, p. 134-135

Truer Christianity

Community, Faith, Truth 0

I was recently asked to explain to three thousand evangelical youth workers gathered together at a conference in Nashville, Tennesee, why millennials like me are leaving the church.

I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff — biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice — but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hears and minds behind, without wearing a mask.

I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people. And I told them that, contrary to popular belief, we can’t be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans. We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives so we can smell b.s. from a mile away. The church is the last place we want to be sold another product, the last place we want to be entertained.

Millenials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity, I said. We’re looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity. Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we’re looking for Jesus — the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he’s always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in suffering, in community, and among the least of these.

— Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday, p. xiii-xiv

A Great Unfolding

Forgiveness, Growth, Life 0

There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

— Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough, p. 15

True Faith

Faith, God, Obedience 0

I think this will throw some light upon the words of our Lord, “If ye have faith and doubt not, if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done.”

Good people, among them John Bunyan, have been tempted to tempt the Lord their God upon the strength of this saying, just as Satan sought to tempt our Lord on the strength of the passage he quoted from the Psalms. They think that as long as they have faith, and believe earnestly enough, it is possible to do and accomplish anything to which they might set their hand.

Happily for such, the assurance to which they would give the name of faith generally fails them in time. Faith is not the fervent setting of the mind on “believing” for such-and-such an outcome — more often than not a desire generated by the man’s own soul — as if we, and not God, were the orignators and initiators of faith by the strength of our passions, the fervor of our prayers, and the forcefulness of our mental processes. True faith, rather, is that which, knowing the Lord’s will, goes and does it, or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills. Faith neither presses into the hidden future, nor is careless of the knowledge that opens the path of action. It is faith’s noblest exercise to act with uncertainty of the result when the duty of obedience is certain, or even when a course seems with strong probability to be duty. Even if a man is mistaken in the honest effort to obey, though his work be burned, by that very fire he will be saved. Nothing saves a man more than the burning of his work, except the doing of work that can stand the fire.

But to put God to the question in any other way than by saying “What will you have me to do?” is an attempt to compel God to declare himself, or to hasten his work, or to imagine it his work what our own soul desires to accomplish.

— George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God, p. 274-275

Healing

Growth, Healing, Trials 0

When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them? The word for that is healing.

— Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough, p. 10