“Visual imagery expressed through poetic language has an emotive force that speaks powerfully to some aspects of truth in a way that precise technical terminology never can.”- Tina Boesch “Metaphor is a word that carries us across the abyss separating the invisible from the visible.”- Eugene Peterson Tina Boesch concludes Chapter 3 of Given as […]
“Blessing and worship spring from the same source — a vision of God’s good character and heart full of trust in God’s promises. Worship is an irrepressible response to seeing who God is in his glory and to rightly perceiving that the blessings that populate our lives are expressions of his grace.”- Tina Boesch As […]
“Blessing begins with seeing. Before words of blessing can reach toward future vision, we must attend to present reality. And that means we must turn our gaze from ourselves . . . and see others as they long to be seen. This is agape seeing, a way of seeing grounded in love and sacrifice. It […]
“The voice that called me out is one with the hand that guides me. God’s hand not only guides, it wraps around me, holding me fast, cradling me safe, and carrying me home.”- Tina Boesch “Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: ‘All nations […]
“Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.”- Simone Weil, Waiting on God “When I gaze at the people and dreams I’ve left, rather than focusing on what God is calling me toward, then I’m looking in the wrong direction.”- Tina Boesch As Tina Boesch continues Chapter […]
“That jolt into the unknown is invigorating when the trip is short . . . but when months stretch into years, when foreignness becomes a way of life, it can be deeply disorienting. The disorientation is on a psychic level as much as a physical one — I lose a sense of who I am.”- […]
“The appropriate, faithful response to God’s blessing is doxology – worship. Before God’s blessing is material or spiritual, it’s relational. Before anything else, God’s blessing invites us into relationship with him, which is also the genesis of abundant life with others.”- Tina Boesch Tina Boesch concludes Chapter 1 of Given as she notes that in […]
“When a blessing is reduced to a phrase we say out of habit, then it’s drained of its significance. A blessing should be a sincere prayer that rises from our souls.”- Tina Boesch As Tina Boesch continues Chapter 1 of Given, she observes that the secular nature of Western culture strips our culture of the […]
“The love Christ Jesus gave/ Be filling every heart for me,/ The love Christ Jesus gave/ Filling me for everyone.”- Traditional Scottish blessing, Nineteenth Century In Chapter 1 (“Blessing in the Beginning”) of Given: The Forgotten Meaning and Practice of Blessing, author Tina Boesch relates a conversation she had with a Turkish friend while living […]
“Our hard decisions become our speed bumps, and thank God for that. Decisions are his way of saying I love you. . . . Our choices shape our lives, and they shape us. But we remain in God’s hand no matter what. Let’s begin to trust ourselves as we walk with our friend Jesus. . […]
“I’ve decided if I had my life to live over again, I would not only climb more mountains, swim more rivers, and watch more sunsets. . . . I would not only go barefoot earlier in the spring and stay out later in the fall; but I would devote not one more minute to monitoring […]
“I don’t have a five year plan. God’s Word is a lamp unto my feet, not my football field.”- Jamie B. Golden, cohost of The Popcast with Knox and Jamie and The Bible Binge In Chapter 23 (“Expect to be Surprised”) of The Next Right Thing, Emily P. Freeman writes that airplane takeoffs cause both […]