I suppose I should not try to look for a theme in the words that came my way this week. Nevertheless, there does seem to be several different streams that touch on how to shed the distractions that keep us from focusing primarily on Christ. Take some time to let these rattle around inside your head and heart.
William Wilberforce (1759-1833)
The cross for the first time revealed God in terms of
weakness and lowliness and suffering; even, humanly speaking,
of absurdity. He was seen thenceforth in the image of the most
timid, most gentle and most vulnerable of all living
creatures--a lamb. Agnus Dei! [The Lamb of God!]
... Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
Prayer is the act by which we divest ourselves of all false
belongings and become free to belong to God and God alone.
... Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932-1996)
We all want to turn away from anything that reveals the failure, pain, sickness and death beneath the brightly painted surface of our ordered lives. Civilization is, at least in part, about pretending that things are better than they are. We all want to be in a happy place, where everyone is nice and good and can fend for themselves. We shun our own weakness and the weakness of others. We refuse to listen to the cry of the needy. How easy it is to fall into the illusion of a beautiful world when we have lost trust in our capacity to make of our broken world a place that can become more beautiful.
Jean Vanier
“Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:18-19
Really excellent essay on our tendency to want to leave, rather than remain and build a community of stability where we are.
I did not intend my creatures to make themselves servants and slaves to the world’s pleasures. They owe their first love to me. Everything else they should love and possess, as I told you, not as if they owned it but as something lent them.
Catherine of Siena
So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
(Ephesians 4:11-13)
Two years later, do not relent in praying for our brother in prison, Pastor Saeed Abedini, in Iran.
The cross for the first time revealed God in terms of
weakness and lowliness and suffering; even, humanly speaking,
of absurdity. He was seen thenceforth in the image of the most
timid, most gentle and most vulnerable of all living
creatures--a lamb. Agnus Dei! [The Lamb of God!]
... Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
Prayer is the act by which we divest ourselves of all falsebelongings and become free to belong to God and God alone.
... Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932-1996)
We all want to turn away from anything that reveals the failure, pain, sickness and death beneath the brightly painted surface of our ordered lives. Civilization is, at least in part, about pretending that things are better than they are. We all want to be in a happy place, where everyone is nice and good and can fend for themselves. We shun our own weakness and the weakness of others. We refuse to listen to the cry of the needy. How easy it is to fall into the illusion of a beautiful world when we have lost trust in our capacity to make of our broken world a place that can become more beautiful.
Jean Vanier
“Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:18-19
Really excellent essay on our tendency to want to leave, rather than remain and build a community of stability where we are.
I did not intend my creatures to make themselves servants and slaves to the world’s pleasures. They owe their first love to me. Everything else they should love and possess, as I told you, not as if they owned it but as something lent them.
Catherine of Siena
So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
(Ephesians 4:11-13)
Two years later, do not relent in praying for our brother in prison, Pastor Saeed Abedini, in Iran.
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