IF
I can enjoy a joke at the expense of another;
if I can in any way slight another in conversation,
or even in thought,
then I know nothing of Calvery Love.

-Amy Carmichael, If

“Christianity doesn’t grow by birth. It grows by conversion.”

-Stanley Hauerwas

“And it always seems that just when daily life seems most unbearable, stretching out before me like a prison sentence, when I seem most dead inside, reduced to mindlessness, bitter tears or both, that what is inmost breaks forth and I realize that what had seemed “dead time” was actually a period of gestation.

It is a quotidian mystery that dailiness can lead to such despair and yet also be at the core of our salvation.  We express this every time we utter the Lord’s Prayer.  As Simone Weil so eloquently stated it in her esssay, “Concerning the Our Father,” the “bread of this world” is all that nourished and energizes us, not only food but the love of friends and faimly, “money, ambition, consideration…power…everthing that gets into us the capacity for action.”  She reminds us that we need to keep praying for this food, acknowledging our needs as daily, because in the act of asking, the prayer awakens in us the trust that God will provide.  But, like the manna that God provided to Israel in the desert, this “bread” cannot be stored.  “We cannot bind our will today for tomorrow,”  Weil writes; “we cannot make a pact with [Christ] that tomorrow he will be within us, even in spite of ourselves.”  Each day brings with it not only the necessity of eating but the renewal of our love of and in God.  This may sound like a simple thing, but it is not easy to maintain faith, hope or love in the everyday.  I wonder if this is because human pride, and particularly a preoccupation with intellectual, artisitc or spiritual matters, can provide a convenient way to ignore our ordinary, daily bodily needs.”

-Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries

“If you cannot express yourself well on each of your beliefs, work and study until you can.  But you must be willing to go through God’s winepress where the grapes are crushed.  Then the time will come when that very expression will become God’s wine of strength to someone else.  Try to state to yourself what you believe to be the absolute truth of God, and you will be allowing God the opportunity to pass it on through you to someone else.”

-Oswald Chambers

“Consequently, gospel stories always have suffering in them.  American Christianity has an allergic reaction to this part of the gospel.  We’d love to hear about God’s love for us, but suffering doesn’t mesh with our right to “the pursuit of happiness.”  so we pray to escape a gospel story, when that is the best gift the Father can give us.  When I was sitting on the plane thinking, everything has gone wrong, that was the point when everything ws going right.  That’s how love works.

The father wants to draw us into the story of his Son.  He doesn’t have a better story to tell, so he keeps retelling it in our lives.  As we reenact the gospel, we are drawn into a strange kind of fellowship.  The taste of Christ is so good that the apostle Paul told the Philippians that he wanted to know “the fellowship of sharing in (Jesus’) sufferings”.  It was Paul’s prayer.”

-Paul Miller, A Praying Life