Saturday, February 24, 2007

Thoughts for the Journey


"Loving other people, it turns out, is all about them. Then in serving and loving the other person--after making that person's cares my priority--the reward from that eventually comes back to me. That means hanging on. Praying without ceasing.
"...Love one another as I have loved you. Jesus meant that for real, it turns out. And what a Savior. He showed us how to do it: Love imperfect people because I have loved even you."

-- Patricia Raybon, from I Told the Mountain to Move.
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"I simply argue that the cross be raised again
at the center of the market place
as well as on the steeple of the church,
I am recovering the claim that
Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral
between two candles:
But on a cross between two thieves;
on a town garbage heap;
At a crossroad of politics so cosmopolitan
that they had to write His title
in Hebrew and in Latin and in Greek. . .
And at the kind of place where cynics talk smut,
and thieves curse and soldiers gamble.
Because that is where He died,
and that is what He died about.
And that is where Christ's men ought to be,
and what church people ought to be about."

-- from, "I simply argue that the cross" George MacLeod, as quoted in Charles R. Swindoll, Come Before Winter (Carol Stream, III: Tyndale House, 1985)
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"A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking.
But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening."

-- Soren Kierkegaard

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"If our prayers are to mean anything to God, they must mean everything to us."

-- Frederick D. Haynes III, from "Prayerfully Handling Situations beyond Your Control," in No Other Help I Know: Sermons on Prayer and Spirituality, ed. J. Alfred Smith, 1996.

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