More Together...

"We can do more together than we can do individually. No church, district, region, or college is sovereign. We are each a part of the whole." ~ N. Gunter

One Passion

"I have but one passion: It is He, it is He alone. The world is the field and the field is the world; and henceforth that country shall be my home where I can be most used in winning souls for Christ." ~ Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf

Forgiveness Is Not...

“Three things forgiveness is not: 1) Not writing “doormat” on our backs and allowing others to walk all over us. 2) Not condoning. 3) Not a release from consequences." ~ Lutz

Swimming Against the Tide

"Most of us, swimming against the tides of trouble the world knows nothing about, need only a bit of praise or encouragement—and we will make the goal." ~ Fleishman

Holiness through Faith & Trust

"We are only made holy through cooperating with what God is doing in us with faith and trust." ~ Diane Leclere

Burden of Resentment Belongs to You...

"The people who have offended us often don’t think they did—and sometimes don’t care. Resentment, therefore, is usually our burden, not theirs." ~ Page

Dreams Are...

“Dreams are illustrations…from the book your soul is writing about you.” ~ Marsha Norman

Decisions Are Easier...When...

"Decisions become easier when your will to please God outweighs your will to please the world." ~ Coetzer

Create, Articulate, Own and Complete

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” ~ Jack Webb

What Drives You Closer?

"If the foundation of your happiness is your vocation, your relationships, or your money, then suffering takes your source of joy away from you. But if your ultimate value in life is God, then suffering drives you closer to your source of joy—God." ~ Tullian Tchividjian

Participate in God's Healing Work

“The Spirit of God is present in our tears to break our hearts with the things that break the heart of God, to show us the ways in which we contribute to the pain of the world, to form us more fully into the likeness of Christ, and to enable us to participate in God’s healing work in this world.” ~ Harnish

Faith Is Not...

“Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them-all the way through!” ~ Richard Rohr

What Is Your Business?

"As is the business of tailors to make clothes and cobblers to make shoes, so it is the business of Christians to pray." ~ Martin Luther

The Power of Modeling

“Positive modeling pricks and sharpens and perfects the one [child] who is watching.” ~ Jorie Kincaid (The Power of Modeling)

Wholesome Self-Image

“If my child learns to obey and to do what is right, and I continue to show him appreciation and encouragement, he will be more likely to have a wholesome self-image than he will if I allow him to do whatever he feels like doing.” ~ William and Candace Backus (Empowering Parents)

Our Faith Requires...

"I am a shepherd who, with his people, has begun to learn a beautiful and difficult truth: our Christian faith requires that we submerge ourselves in this world. The world that the church must serve is the world of the poor, and the poor are the ones who decide what it means for the church to really live in the world." ~ Archbishop Oscar Romero 

Modeling

“Modeling shifts my primary focus as a parent from doing to being. If my children watch me, they will probably become very much like me. This means that my identity is very important.” ~ Jorie Kincaid (The Power of Modeling)

Mystery of Grace

“I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” ~ Anne Lamott

Your Child's World

“Take an interest in your child’s world and they may take an interest in yours.” ~ Steve Miller (quoted in Daddy, I Blew Up the Shed by Phil Callaway)

Verbs...

“We mostly spend our lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have and to Do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual, even on the religious plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest, forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in the fundamental verb, to Be, and that Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of the spiritual life.” ~ Evelyn Underhill

Wait for the Spirit's Power

“Since the days of Pentecost, has the whole church ever put aside every other work and waited upon him for ten days, that the Spirit’s power might be manifested? We give too much attention to method and machinery and resources, and too little to the source of power.” ~ J. Hudson Taylor

Expect the Unexpected

“Beware in your prayers, above everything else, of limiting God; not only by unbelief, but by thinking that you know what he can do. Expect unexpected things ‘above all that we ask or think.’” ~ Andrew Murray

Learn to Disagree...

“We’re never going to agree with everyone we come in contact with, but we must learn how to disagree in a way that honors Christ and his body.” ~ Braun

An Addiction

"As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their "right" place.” ~ Henri Nouwen

Low Point Lessons

“God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.” ~ C. S. Lewis

Prayer Is Not...

“Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts.” ~ Mother Teresa

Story of Love

“When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves—that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.” ~ N. T. Wright

Get Your Rest

“Once people feel nourished and refreshed, they cannot help but be kind; just so, the world aches for the generosity of a well-rested people.” ~ Wayne Muller

An Easy Substitute

“Power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.” ~ Henri J. M. Nouwen

Forgiveness...

“Forgiveness, the act of loving my enemy, like forgiveness of self, is not a sudden event, a rapid change of heart. Most of the time it is a long process that begins with the desire to be free, to accept ourselves as we are, and to grow in the love of those who are different and those who have hurt us or appear as rivals. It is the process of getting out of the prison of our likes and dislikes, our hatreds and fears, and walking to freedom and compassion.” ~ Jean Vanier

Solitary Conceit...

“When I first became a Christian, about fourteen years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and wouldn’t go to the churches and Gospel Halls; I disliked very much their hymns which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren’t fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit.” ~ C. S. Lewis

A Danger

“Jesus wasn’t just odd. He was literally a danger to the established order. If their goal was to preserve life as they knew it, the Pharisees were right to oppose him at every turn. Jesus was a savior to the lost, not a cheerleader for the found. He came to redeem sinners, not to entertain or soothe the prickly.” ~ Tom Ehrich

Right Relationship

“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

More Than Not Dying

"Living is a great deal more than simply not dying. It is carrying out a mission, committing oneself to fashion some meaning that will attain eternity. Time does not create enough space for us to completely realize the meaning of life. Our desires, our hopes, our love, our capacity to communicate, and our powers of understanding surpass and transcend everything that might present itself to us. In wanting the world, human beings seek the Absolute that is God and that surpasses the limits of this world." ~ Leonardo Boff

Prayer...

“Prayer penetrates doors we will never enter. Prayer breaks hearts that have been hardened by the most ruthless pursuit of position. Prayer bridges the gap between the modest den of the meek and the highest places of government, where laws are made and bills are signed and officials wrestle against impossible odds.” ~ Beth Moore

Hollow Us Out

“You hollow us out, God, so that we may carry you, and you endlessly fill us only to be emptied again. Make smooth our inward spaces and sturdy, that we may hold you with less resistance and bear you with deeper grace.” ~ Jan Richardson

Earthly Possessions...

“Be not anxious! Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of all anxiety. If our hearts are set on them, our reward is an anxiety whose burden is intolerable…. When we seek for security in possessions we are trying to drive out care with care, and the net result is the precise opposite of our anticipations. The fetters which bind us to our possessions prove to be cares themselves.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Endless Cycle of Greed

“Avarice concerns our relationship with material goods, and it is unrelenting in our culture…. We are shamelessly exhorted to believe that our spiritual hunger for fulfillment can be satisfied if only we have “the right things”: the name-brand running shoes, the designer scarf, the highest fidelity CD player, the fastest Internet server, the biggest car, the best-programmed microwave, the purest bottled water…. We are stuck in an endless cycle of greed where nothing is ever enough. No other competitor comes close to matching the effectiveness with which greed prevents us from honestly reflecting on our fundamental neediness for God.” ~ Norvene Vest

Empower Your Children

“Empowering is accomplished through training, or the process of disciplining – not through controlling.” ~ Jeff VanVonderen (Families Where Grace Is in Place)

Holiness Is...

“Holiness is nothing more and nothing less than living in the world like Jesus, through the indwelling power of the Spirit of Jesus.” ~ David Busic

Don't Provoke or Exasperate Your Children

“No parent is capable of controlling his/her child’s anger.

But we are capable of controlling whether or not we provoke them.” ~ Jeff VanVonderen (Families Where Grace Is in Place) See Ephesians 6:4

Prayer = Force Against Evil

“God shapes the world by prayer. The more prayer there is in the world the better the world will be, the mightier the forces against evil …” ~ E.M. Bounds

Becoming Human

“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