“All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.” -Eugene H. Peterson-
“No life of faith can be lived privately. There must be overflow into the lives of others.” -Eugene H. Peterson-
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”-- Buddha
“And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.”
“Many happy returns of this day to you – and you --and you, Sir – nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that same – you understand me – a speck of the motley.”
Charles Lamb
(Motley is the traditional costume of the court jester, fool, or the harlequin character in commedia dell’arte. The harlequin wears a patchwork of red, green and blue diamonds that is still a fashion motif. - Wiki)
The seasoned soul in Christ will have a steady joy and a steady sorrow. They protect each other. Joy is protected from being flippant by steady sorrow. Sorrow is protected from being fatal by steady joy. ~~ John Piper
2 Cor. 6
in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; 8 through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; 9 known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; 10 sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.
“What makes a genius? The ability to see. To see what? The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation, God in the human and human in God and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears.” -Brennan Manning-
The beauty of a child is her eyes! Filled with awe and wonderment moment to moment. She has no fixed stale stinky answers, but is looking for God to speak! All answers are stale and empty. Only awe and wonderment in the eyes are true!~~Bodhi
“It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.”-- Kenichi Ohmae
"Without Easter, Good Friday would have no meaning. Without Easter, there would be no hope that suffering and abandonment might be tolerable.
But with Easter, a way out becomes visible for human sorrows, an absolute future: more than a hope, a divine expectation. " -Hans Urs von Balthasar-
“The trouble with our ideals is that if we live up to all of them, we become impossible to live with.” -Brennan Manning-
“I want neither a terrorist spirituality that keeps me in a perpetual state of fright about being in right relationship with my heavenly Father nor a sappy spirituality that portrays God as such a benign teddy bear that there is no aberrant behavior or desire of mine that he will not condone. I want a relationship with the Abba of Jesus, who is infinitely compassionate with my brokenness and at the same time an awesome, incomprehensible, and unwieldy Mystery.” -Brennan Manning-
What are the things that you think you can’t do? Pick a couple of them and give it an honest try. Yes, this is the time to break the self created limitations and train your brain to create new channels, new pathways to learn new things to prove to yourself that it is your thoughts and beliefs that can be changed and that will change your life forever. An old lady went to a dancing school at 75 as that was what she always wanted to do but could never do. Finally, she trained herself to be a great dancer. She broke free from her limitations.
It is never too late to learn new things to bring freshness into your life. Break free and enjoy!
~~Bodhi
“If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d be a shortage of fishing poles.”-- Doug Larson
“The word ‘christian’ means different things to different people. To one person it means a stiff, upright, inflexible way of life, colorless and unbending. To another it means a risky, surprised-filled adventure, lived tiptoe at the edge of expectation…If we get our information from the biblical material, there is no doubt that the Christian life is a dancing, leaping, daring life.” -Eugene H. Peterson-
Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith."-- Henry Ward Beecher
“The Ragamuffin rabble are the unsung assembly of saved sinners who are little in their own sight, conscious of their brokenness and powerlessness before God, and who cast themselves on His mercy. Startled by the extravagant love of God, they do not require success, fame, wealth, or power to validate their worth. Their spirit transcends all distinctions between the powerful and powerless, educated and illiterate, billionaires and bag ladies, high-tech geeks and low-tech nerds, males and females, the circus and the sanctuary.” -Brennan Manning-
“To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us. To follow Jesus means picking up rhythms and ways of doing things that are often unsaid but always derivative from Jesus, formed by the influence of Jesus. To follow Jesus means that we can’t separate what Jesus is saying from what Jesus is doing and the way that he is doing it. To follow Jesus is as much, or maybe even more, about feet as it is about ears and eyes” - Eugene H. Peterson-
I have learned one thing in life. The more you give the more you receive. I have traveled around the world and only shared the gift of my Gurudev to everyone I met, worked for my less privileged sisters and brothers only to inspire in them self help and mutual help, but never bothered to raise funds and beg money from anyone anywhere, for I knew the universal law, Giving is receiving. I never wanted to build an empire in the name of God and religion, or my Mission, but just have enough money to serve One in all. At 70+ I have seen money and greed are at the root of all disaster in the would. So I prayed to God, give me JUST enough to fulfil Your Mission on earth. Keep me as dust at Your lotus feet.
~~Bodhi
“When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen. There will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly.”-- Patrick Overton
“The gospel of a God found in broken flesh, humility, and measureless charity has defeated all the old lies, rendered the ancient order visibly insufficient and even slightly absurd, and instilled in us a longing for transcendent love so deep that-if once yielded to-it will never grant us rest anywhere but in Christ.” -David Bentley Hart-
“It is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity; sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers.” -David Bentley Hart-
The world looks so beautiful when man made divisions dissolve creating space for unity in diversity and manifest humanity as One universal family. Vedas talks of this as “Vasudaiva Kutumbakam “ or the world is one family. ~~Bodhi
Look at it this way: the creation story, how we got here, takes up a page. The next thousand pages…are concerned with how we treat each other while we’re here; how we create and maintain a civil society. Creation is clearly not the emphasis of the book, the other 99.999% is. It’s interesting that the vocal objections to conventional evolution are coming from the Physics and Math departments - the outsiders.
SiGreybeard
“If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.”-- James A. Garfield
