Freedom is not having everything we crave, it's being able to go without the things we crave and being OK with it.
The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.
Jesus is God's way of refusing to give up his dream for the world.
If it is true, if it is beautiful, if it is honorable, if it is right, then claim it. Because it is from God. And you belong to God.
If anybody didn't have a messiah complex, it was Jesus
Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two—love and controlling power over the other person—are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.
because God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.
Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it's alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren't opposites, they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.
What we do comes out of who we believe we are.
The danger is that in reaction to abuses and distortions of an idea, we'll reject it completely. And in the process miss out on the good of it, the worth of it, the truth of it.
As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn't come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain him, especially the one called 'Christianity'.
If we want hell, if we want heaven, they are ours. That's how love works. It can't be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says yes, we can have what we want, because love wins.
You turn the light on, you get all kinds of bugs.
Whenever you create anything, you take a risk. And that includes your life. It may work out, it may not. It may be well received, it may not be. . . . It's always a risk to take action. It might not work, it might blow up in your face, you might lose money, you might fail. No one may get it. But that's not the only risk. There's another risk: the risk of not trying it. How is not trying a risk? You risk settling and continuing in the same direction in the same way, wondering about other paths and possibilities, believing that this is as good as it gets while discontent gnaws away at your soul.
There are always two risks. There's the risk of not trying something new, and there's the risk of not trying it. . . . Either way, there's risk. And sometimes stepping out and trying something new is actually the less risky thing to do.
Success is when you're seduced into thinking that your joy and satisfaction are not here but there--somewhere in the future, at some moment when you accomplish X or you win Y. Success can never get enough. It makes your head spin, because you get that thing you were desperately working for, for all those years, and when you get it, you realize that it isn't what you thought it was.
Goals and plans are fine, and they can often be effective motivators, but success promises something it can't deliver. As soon as you reach your goal, success creates a new one, which creates new anxieties and stresses.
Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.
I embrace the term 'evangelical,' if by that we mean a belief that we together can actually work for change in the world, caring for the environment, extending to the poor generosity and kindness, a hopeful outlook. That's a beautiful sort of thing.
Suffering is traumatic and awful and we get angry and we shake our fists at the heavens and we vent and rage and weep. But in the process we discover a new tomorrow, one we never would have imagined otherwise.
