Finding Home

"Not all who wander are lost"

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People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway. If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway. What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway. Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway. In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway. -credited to Mother Teresa

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No, reverence or holy fear suggests this dynamic tension of being drawn to the beautiful and mysterious flame, while always remembering that the flame is powerful and transcendent beyond all imagination. Reverence means wanting to avoid the dual dangers of thinking of the living God as a distant, impersonal, uncaring force or faceless principle, on the one hand, and reducing God to one’s pet personal deity on a leash or genie in a bottle, on the other hand.

Brian McLaren, Naked Spirituality, p.44

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...as we approach God, we begin not as knowers, but as the known. We are named before we name, called before we call, spoken to before we speak. What feels like an initiative on our part turns out to be the response to a prior initiative taken by the one who calls us.

Brian McLaren, Naked Spirituality, p.40

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I don’t have to be somewhere else—right here is okay. In fact, it’s the only place I can be to begin to awaken spiritually. Here. Now. Just as I am. Being present here where we are can actually be tougher than it seems. I’m always tempted to be partially somewhere else, to pretend I’m not where I am, who I am, how I am.

Brian McLaren, Naked Spirituality, p.35

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When we begin by naming God, too often we assume that we know more about the one we’re addressing than we may actually know. The name carries too much unacknowledged conceptual freight for us... In doing so we may falsely assume that our idea of God is identical to God, that the real God ‘out there’ is no bigger than and no different from the idea we have ‘in here’ in our heads.

Brian McLaren, Naked Spirituality, p.33

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The spiritual life is a Spirit life...The Spirit of God is the fine wine of justice, joy, and peace; the uncontained wind of creativity, comfort, and liberation; the living water of holiness, beauty, and love. Whenever people encounter justice, joy, peace, creativity, comfort, liberation, holiness, beauty, love, or any other good thing, they are in some way encountering the Spirit, or at least the signature or aftermath of the Spirit.

Brian McLaren, Naked Spirituality, p.18-19

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“Most important, dramatic spiritual experiences simply aren’t the point. Whatever the value of extraordinary dramatic spiritual experiences, to which some people seem more prone than others, I’m convinced that what matters most—and is available to everyone—is daily, ordinary spiritual experience.”

Brian McLaren, Naked Spirituality

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...discovering God's will for one's life is not so much a matter of seeking out miraculous signs and wonders as it is being attentive to who you are where we are.  It is not as if our abilities, concerns, and interests are just there, as an accident of nature, and then God has to intervene in some special way in order to make his will known to us in a completely unrelated manner.  Rather, in making a career choice, we ought to take seriously the doctrine of divine providence: God himself gives us whatever legitimate abilities, concerns, and interests we in fact possess.  These are his gifts, and for that very reason they can serve as indicators of his will for our lives.  In coming to know ourselves and our situation, we come to know God's will.

Lee Hardy, "Making the Match: Career Choice," Leading Lives that Matter, p.99

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There is a reason why I am who I am, although that reason may not be immediately apparent to me.  I was placed here for a purpose, and that purpose is one which I am, in part, to discover, not invent.  That facts about me are indicators of the divine intent for my life, indicators which are to be interpreted in the light of God's revealed Word.

Lee Hardy, "Making the Match: Career Choice," Leading Lives that Matter, p.93

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...one call goes out to all - the call of discipleship.  For it is incumbent upon all Christians to follow Christ, and, in so doing, to become the kind of people God wants us to be. the call of the gospel is not to a particular occupation, but to sainthood.  Yet we are also as Christians commanded, and therefore called, to love and serve our neighbors with the gifts that God has given to us.  Each one of us, writes St. Peter, 'should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms.'

Lee Hardy, "Making the Match: Career Choice," Leading Lives that Matter, p.91

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The busy soul gets attached to the wrong things, because the soul is sticky.

Soul Keeping, John Ortberg p.59