Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
If my activism, however well-motivated, drives out love, then I have misunderstood Jesus’ gospel. I am stuck with law, not the gospel of grace.
The rubber hits the road when we try to show grace to a person most unlike us, even someone morally offensive.
We in the church have humility and contrition to offer the world, not a formula for success. Almost alone in our success-oriented society, we admit that we have failed, are failing, and always will fail.
Eugene Peterson points out that "the root meaning in Hebrew of salvation is to be broad, to become spacious, to enlarge. It carries the sense of deliverance from an existence that has become compressed, confined and cramped. " God wants to set free, to make it possible for us to live open and loving lives with God and our neighbors. "I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free," wrote the psalmist.
We tend to think, 'Life should be fair because God is fair. ' But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life- by expecting constant good health for example- then I set myself up for crashing disappointment.
The world says you gain your life by getting more and more and more and more, but Jesus says, 'No, that leads to death. You get it back by giving it away and when you give it away you get it back. '
For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U. S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.
We were all crazy about music and almost all the money we had, we spent for equipment.
If I fail, you will never hear of me again.
Every time I think that I'm getting old, and gradually going to the grave, something else happens.