“We are pursuing a sustaining grace, a power, a presence, life-force — the daily experience of more of God in more of us. We are doing this largely through the healing and restoration of our own souls, the beautiful, besieged vessels he longs to fill.”- John Eldredge “I have given them the glory that you […]
” . . . that’s exactly what we do to find more of God — we practice belief. We exercise it. We begin by transferring the faculty of belief from our feelings to our will. This takes some getting used to, but we employ a bit of benevolent detachment from our own emotional rollercoaster. Not […]
“Sometimes I wake, and, lo! I have forgot/ And drifted out upon an ebbing sea!/ My soul that was at rest now resteth not,/ For I am with myself and not with Thee.”- George Mac Donald, Diary of an Old Soul “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope […]
“God surrounds us; we swim in God like we swim in oxygen. He is by your side at this very moment, as you read this sentence. Despite this reality — and what a wonderful reality it is — we don’t always feel him near; don’t have a consistent experience of his presence (some people rarely […]
“God in his mercy has given us a grace for this recurrent, incessant, unavoidable, daily experience of loss, and that gift is memory. Through which — if we make use of it — we can go back and drink more deeply, savor, take in the full gift of wonderful moments great and small (for the […]
“Each year . . . lays down a new layer of story and adventure, beauty and encounter. Layer upon layer . . . like the technique Rembrandt and the Old Masters used in their painting: carefully laying down dozens of layers of paint to achieve the extraordinary effect of depth and gravitas. The power of […]
“We can’t stand at a distance from our own soul and ask Christ to ‘go in there and deal with it.’ This isn’t hostage negotiation; we don’t hide a block away and hope God takes care of business. This is your own soul we’re talking about; the door opens from the inside.”- John Eldredge “Here […]
“Oh, what kindness we begin to practice when we act like our losses matter. . . . Loss, disappointment, grief, and injustice provoke anger. . . . Your rage is not a sign that something’s wrong with you; there’s something wrong with the world. . . . We’re often embarrassed by our anger, but it’s […]
“I’m beginning the conversation with neglected loss, disappointment, and grief not because those are the main issues in any person’s life, but because those are the things we tend to run from. Of course we do. . . . Problem is, we are running from huge tracts of our own soul, leaving them behind, and […]
“The Christian life only works through total abandonment. You have to be all in. If we hold anything back, retain some part of our lives for ourselves, large or small, the Self will rule there and continually set itself against God in us. . . . Most disappointing Christian experiences can be explained by the […]
“Over time throughout our lives, the Self stakes out its own territory within us to assure getting its own way, ordering our world to its likings. It has imbedded assumptions and privileges in our psyche; there’s a momentum to its desires, motives, and presence in us. I call this the Self Life. It’s the Self […]
“Envy hates to see other men happy. . . . It begins by asking, plausibly: ‘Why should I not enjoy what others enjoy?’ and it ends by demanding: ‘Why should others enjoy what I may not?’ Envy is the great leveler; if it cannot level things up, it will level them down, and the words […]