“The most natural thing for us to do when we’ve been jolted (from the restaurant) into the alleyway by life is to think…
This is where my hope is lost.
My sweet dream has been snatched away with it.
The wild reality of God, though, is that this is where hope begins.
Hope begins when the memory of what was becomes a longing for what is to be restored.”
-Jan Meyers
“The season of Lent, during which winter and spring struggle with each other for dominance, helps us in a special way to cry out for God’s mercy.”
-Henri Nouwen
“Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”
-G.K. Chesterton
“The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.”
-N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope
Jesus Christ isn’t the way of life.
He is Life itself.
-My Dad (he possibly could have picked it up from another source)
“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
-Henri Nouwen, The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey
“Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out…”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
“Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly.
The hard truth is that all people love poorly.
We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly.
That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”
-Henri Nouwen
“We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
peacocks for pilgrims 