†

† Creature of grace 32 year old photographer living in England [Sams photographs] Other links: Book Recommendations ____________________________

[consciouslysam]

“Whereas how cheerless and monotonously banal is the timorous fantasy. A slave of a shadow of an idea. The slave of the first cloud that suddenly obscures the sun and fills with anguish the heart…”

Fyodor Dostoevsky in White Nights

[consciouslysam]

“Our lives were never meant to be about right and wrong, but instead about the good and the beautiful. Being right is all about you. Doing good is about others.”

- Erwin McManus

[consciouslysam]

“in the face of evil, our calling is not merely resistance but renewal – to persistently seek life that overflows.”

- Haejin Shim Fujimura

[consciouslysam]

“If I think I am only going to have a good life, if I get more, that is immediately an engine for hurry, and therefore anxiety because I don’t have enough. Peace and contentment really go together.”

- Alan Fading

[consciouslysam]

“The world’s weapons are not powerful, because they can never bring peace and justice. They only escalate chaos, violence and death. The bigger our missiles the more powerless they prove themselves to be in restoring justice to the world.”

- Brad Jersak

[consciouslysam]

“If there is no God then men and women cannot be made in His image and are not therefore required to act in accordance with that image.”

- Carl Trueman

[consciouslysam]

“We wildly underestimate how much grief we carry”

Entering the Room of Grief During Lent

Curt Thompson explores how Lent and grief are connected, and how naming our grief in community can comfort us and help us know we are loved.

[consciouslysam]

“Others, by their ability to satisfy our desires so effortlessly, become addictive, blinding us to the real thing.”

It’s time to stop hacking humanity

From cradle to grave, surrogacy to smartphones to gender surgery to euthanasia, Americans are using technology to shortcut human nature — an

[consciouslysam]

“Love looks like us, and that can be a little daunting.

Love is why we are here at all, on the couch and in the world, with a heart for the common good.

Why we have hope and a lifeline when we don’t.”

Anne Lamott : Somehow - Thoughts on Love

[consciouslysam]

“If you want to have loving feelings, do loving things.”

Anne Lamott : Thoughts on Love

[consciouslysam]

“When faced with the absence of the most important people in our lives, our brains respond by trying to solve a problem… This is where the pain of grief comes from: there is a problem that cannot be solved.”

- Natasha Smith

[consciouslysam]

“Right now, you are becoming your future.”

John Mark Comer

[consciouslysam]

“I think we all have so much longing in us to live. We have an image of what our life wants to look like, feel like, tastes, sense. And I think it’s so hard to have the courage to follow those longings, to own those longings, to want what we want. Because then what if we don’t fucking get it? And then the heartbreak comes. And the deepest longings are the ones that we are really afraid to mention, the ones that really could cost us.”

Andrew Garfield

[consciouslysam]

“we don’t get to be in charge of what we lose, how we lose it, and when.”

Andrew Garfield

[consciouslysam]

“I think that is the killer, that impulse that is not mine, that is inherited, that is conditioned from our culture, to not feel to calcify the heart, to not reveal the heart, to not trust another person with our hearts is what gets us into trouble.”

Andrew Garfield

[consciouslysam]

“But the sadness is longing. It’s true longing and there’s no shame in it.”

Andrew Garfield

[consciouslysam]

“You are already philosophical, you only need to have been born. You are already artful, you already put things together creatively to produce new things. You are both of these things, even if you have never made a profession of either of them. Even if you didn’t already realise you are.”

- Esther Lightcap Meek