God's Palette

God does not work by only one method, paint in only one colour, play in only one key, nor does He make only one star shine onto the earth. God's mystery is the rich spectrum of colour that is gathered together in the purity of the sun's white light. The symphonic harmony of all the stars is built up on precisely their manifold variety. But all this is gathered together and will be gathered together at the end of time in the unity of the Kingdom of God.

- Eberhard Arnold

Do It Again

A child kicks its legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough... It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again," to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again," to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

- G. K. Chesterton in "Orthodoxy" [1909]

Baptism, a Rite of Passage

Baptism is a rite of passage. The Jewish people passed through the Red Sea to the Promised Land in the great exodus. Jesus himself wanted to make this exodus by passing through suffering and death into the house of his heavenly Father. This was his baptism. He asked his disciples and now asks us us: "Can you ... be baptised with the baptism with which I shall be baptised?" (Mark 10:38). When the apostle Paul, therefore, speaks about our baptism, he calls it a baptism into Jesus' death (Romans 6:4).
To be baptised means to make the passage with the people of Israel and with Jesus from slavery to freedom and from death to new life. It is a commitment to a life in and through Jesus.

- Henri Nouwen

Killing Him Softly

Nothing is more dangerous to the advancement of God's kingdom than religion. But this is what Christianity has become. Do you not know that it is possible to kill Christ with such Christianity? After all, what is more important - Christianity or Christ? And I'll say even more: we can kill Christ with the Bible! Which is greater: the Bible or Christ? Yes, we can even kill Christ with our prayers. When we approach God with our prayers full of self-love and self-satisfaction, when the aim of our prayers is to make our world great, our prayers are in vain.

- C. F. Blumhardt

Isn't it Strange?

Isn't it strange how 20 dollars seems like such a large amount when you donate it to church, but such a small amount when you go shopping?
Isn't it strange how 2 hours seem so long when you're at church, and how short they seem when you're watching a good movie?
Isn't it strange that you can't find a word to say when you're praying, but you have no trouble thinking what to talk about with a friend?
Isn't it strange how difficult and boring it is to read one chapter of the Bible, but how easy it is to read 100 pages of a popular novel?
Isn't it strange how everyone wants front-row-tickets to concerts or games, but they do whatever is possible to sit at the last row in Church?
Isn't it strange how we need to know about an event for Church 2-3 weeks before the day so we can include it in our agenda, but we can adjust it for other events in the last minute?
Isn't it strange how difficult it is to learn a fact about God to share it with others, but how easy it is to learn, understand, extend and repeat gossip?
Isn't it strange how we believe everything that magazines and newspapers say, but we question the words in the Bible?
Isn't it strange how everyone wants a place in heaven, but they don't want to believe, do, or say anything to get there?
IT'S STRANGE ISN'T IT?

Source unknown

Humble Love

My heart is transformed by the smile of trust given by some people who are terribly fragile and weak. They call forth new energies from me. They seem to break down barriers and bring me a new freedom.
It is the same with the smile of a child: even the hardest heart can’t resist. Contact with people who are weak and who are crying out...is one of the most important nourishments in our lives. When we let ourselves be really touched by the gift of their presence, they leave something precious in our hearts.
As long as we remain at the level of “doing” things for people, we tend to stay behind our barriers of superiority. We ought to welcome the gift of the poor with open hands. Jesus says, “What you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me.”

- Jean Vanier

Baptism: Becoming Children of the Light

When Jesus appears for the last time to his disciples, he sends them out into the world saying: "Go, ... make disciples of all nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19).
Jesus offers us baptism as the way to enter into communion with God, Father, Son, and Spirit, and to live our lives as God's beloved children. Through baptism we say no to the world. We declare that we no longer want to remain children of the darkness but want to become children of the light, God's children. We do not want to escape the world, but we want to live in it without belonging to it. That is what baptism enables us to do.

- Henri Nouwen

Baptism and Eucharist

Sacraments are very specific events in which God touches us through creation and transforms us into living Christs. The two main sacraments are baptism and the Eucharist. In baptism water is the way to transformation. In the Eucharist it is bread and wine. The most ordinary things in life - water, bread, and wine - become the sacred way by which God comes to us.
These sacraments are actual events. Water, bread, and wine are not simple reminders of God's love; they bring God to us. In baptism we are set free from the slavery of sin and dressed with Christ. In the Eucharist, Christ himself becomes our food and drink.

- Henri Nouwen

The Sacredness of God's Handiwork

How do we live in creation? Do we relate to it as a place full of "things" we can use for whatever need we want to fulfill and whatever goal we wish to accomplish? Or do we see creation first of all as a sacramental reality, a sacred space where God reveals to us the immense beauty of the Divine?
As long as we only use creation, we cannot recognise its sacredness because we are approaching it as if we are its owners. But when we relate to all that surrounds us as created by the same God who created us and as the place where God appears to us and calls us to worship and adoration, then we are able to recognise the sacred quality of all God's handiwork.

- Henri Nouwen

When Crisis Comes

We presume that we would be ready for battle if confronted with a great crisis, but it is not the crisis that builds something within us - it simply reveals what we are made of already. Do you find yourself saying, "If God calls me to battle, of course I will rise to the occasion"? Yet you won't rise to the occasion unless you have done so on God's training ground [of worship, Bible study, and prayer]. If you are not doing the task that is closest to you now, which God has engineered into your life, when the crisis comes, instead of being fit for battle, you will be revealed as being unfit. Crises always reveal a person's true character.

- Oswald Chambers in "My Utmost for His Highest"

The Created Order as Sacrament

When God took on flesh in Jesus Christ, the uncreated and the created, the eternal and the temporal, the divine and the human became united. This unity meant that all that is mortal now points to the immortal, all that is finite now points to the infinite. In and through Jesus all creation has become like a splendid veil, through which the face of God is revealed to us.
This is called the sacramental quality of the created order. All that is is sacred because all that is speaks of God's redeeming love. Seas and winds, mountains and trees, sun, moon, and stars, and all the animals and people have become sacred windows offering us glimpses of God.

- Henri Nouwen

Meditation

When Jesus says: "Sky and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away" (Luke 21:33), he shows us a direct way to eternal life. The words of Jesus have the power to transform our hearts and minds and lead us into the Kingdom of God. "The words I have spoken to you," Jesus says, "are spirit and they are life" (John 6:63).
Through meditation we can let the words of Jesus descend from our minds into our hearts and create there a dwelling place for the Spirit. Whatever we do and wherever we go, let us stay close to the words of Jesus. They are words of eternal life.

- Henri Nouwen

On The Journey Toward Celebrating Life

In the Torah portion that is read during the Passover season, the question "Who is like You, O Lord?" appears. This year as I looked at that question, I saw something I had not seen in previous readings. I saw the question "Who is like you, Albert?" Or "Who is like you, dear reader?" I began to think that we spend so much of our time looking at other people and sometimes saying we wished we were more like them, we often do not recognize or celebrate our own uniqueness. Nor do we recognize that someone is looking at us and wondering: "How can I be more like him or her?" Unless we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and open, we show only, what we feel, the other will accept. And when we look at others, we see only what they have acquired or accomplished, the façade of their being.
Sometimes I think we are afraid to celebrate our uniqueness because by its very definition it's "just who I am," talented in some areas and unskilled in others, capable of great compassion and able to cause unusual hurt. Recognizing our specialness is not about erecting images of ego, but it is about accepting the invitation to delight in those aspects of our lives - our inner lives - that make us unique. It is in doing this that we become more able to celebrate life.
A story is told about a man who was visited by the angel of death. The angel told him he would die in a few days. "Answer one question for me," the man begged. "What will they ask me when I appear before the heavenly tribunal?" "I can't tell you what they will ask, but I can tell you what they will not ask! They will not ask: 'Why weren't you more like your neighbor or your co-worker or your brother...' " From this, the rabbis tell us, we are to understand that the eternal question is "Why are we not more like our authentic selves?" How will you acknowledge and celebrate your uniqueness?

- Albert M. Lewis

Call To Me

The prayer power has never been tried to its full capacity. If we want to see mighty works of Divine power and grace wrought in the place of weakness, failure and disappointment, let us answer God's standing challenge, "Call to me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know." (Jeremiah 33:3)

- Hudson Taylor (1832-1905)

Growth

At what instant does the summer change?
What subtle chemistry of air
and sunlight on the clean and windsmooth sand?
The small birds at the water's edge—
yesterday they were not there.

So suddenly the magic door is shut,
the trio suddenly is done,
the clasped hands inexplicably apart;
however clear, however bright,
the road we traveled on is gone.

from Jane Tyson Clement, "No One Can Stem the Tide"

Christianity Is Not Hereditary

Jesus answered, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit."
(John 3:5,6 NRSV)

Here [Jesus] tells us that the new birth is first of all "not of [the flesh]." You don't get it through the blood stream, through heredity. Your parents can give you much, but they cannot give you this. Being born in a Christian home does not make you a Christian.

- E. Stanley Jones in "Conversion"

Key Ingredients To Making A Difference

Have a mission in life. You have to be a part of something bigger than yourself. Get involved in making life better for people. Adopt a needy child or become a foster parent. Be a coach or a tutor to inner-city kids or run for school board.
Seek out and surround yourself with great role models. Frankly, I don't like hanging around mediocrity. I don't want my mind affected by a "just good enough" attitude. When you're on a team with great people, everyone in the group motivates and inspires each other to work their hardest and be the best.
Work hard. It may mean taking extra classes, doing more reading, watching less TV. If you really want it-whatever "it" is-you'll get it done. If you don't get it done, then you don't really want it, you just wish you had it.
Be bold, be daring, be courageous. If you want to win big, you've got to take some calculated risks. If you care enough about serving Jesus Christ, then you don't worry so much about what other people might say about you or do to you.
Be persistent. Very few touchdowns are made with a single 99-yard pass. Most come at the end of a 10- or 15-down drive made up of five- and three-yard gains, even some lost yards.
If you don't hang in there, you'll never get to cross the goal line and do the Lambeau leap! But if you're persistent, ain't nobody gonna stop you.

- Reggie White, "Men of Integrity" September/October 2002, Vol. 5, No. 5

Keeping Close to the Word of Jesus

The words of Jesus can keep us erect and confident in the midst of the turmoil of the end-time. They can support us, encourage us, and give us life even when everything around us speaks of death. Jesus' words are food for eternal life. They do much more than give us ideas and inspiration. They lead us into the eternal life while we are still being clothed in mortal flesh.
When we keep close to the word of Jesus, reflecting on it, "chewing" on it, eating it as food for the soul, we will enter even more deeply into the everlasting love of God.

- Henri Nouwen

Standing Under the Cross

Standing erect, holding our heads high, is the attitude of spiritually mature people in face of the calamities of our world. The facts of everyday life are a rich source for doomsday thinking and feeling. But it is possible for us to resist this temptation and to stand with self-confidence in this world, never losing our spiritual ground, always aware that "sky and earth will pass away" but the words of Jesus will never pass away (see Luke 21:33).
Let us be like Mary, the mother of Jesus, who stood under the cross, trusting in God's faithfulness notwithstanding the death of his beloved Child.

- Henri Nouwen

But without God...

Everywhere and at all times demons lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in the order of creation as founded for him by God… When he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate. Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenceless against evil. He is like a rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air.

Members of the White Rose (Munich, 1940-43)

Living in a State of Preparedness

Everything that comes from God asks for an open and faithful heart. We cannot live with hope and joy in the end-time unless we are living in a state of preparedness. We have to be careful because, as the Apostle Peter says: "Your enemy the devil is on the prowl like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour" (1 Peter 5.8). Therefore Jesus says: "Watch yourselves, or your hearts will be coarsened by debauchery and drunkenness and the cares of life. ... Stay awake, praying at all times for the strength to survive all that is going to happen, and to hold your ground before the Son of Man" (Luke 21:34-36). That's what living in the Spirit of Jesus calls us to.

- Henri Nouwen

Standing Erect

About the end-time Jesus says: "There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars; on earth nations in agony, bewildered by the turmoil of the ocean and its waves; men fainting away with terror and fear at what menaces the world, for the power of heaven will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory" (Luke 21:25-28) All of this is already taking place. For anyone who has listened deeply to the heart of God, the despair of the world and the coming of the great liberation are both visible every day.
What then should we do? Jesus says it clearly: "Stand erect, hold your heads high, because your liberation is near at hand" (Luke 21:28). There is so much hope here. We do not have to faint but can stand straight, welcoming our Lord with outstretched arms.

- Henri Nouwen

Our Primary Love

I have become convinced that the things which keep us from a live relationship to Christ are often not the "bad" things in our lives, but the good things which capture our imaginations and keep them from focusing on Jesus Christ. I think this accounts for a good bit of our frustration as church [people]. We look around in our lives and say, "No stealing, no murder, no adultery! Why, God, am I so miserable and frustrated in my Christian life?" But we have not seen the fact that we have never really offered Him the one thing He requires - our primary love.

- Keith Miller in "The Taste of New Wine"

The Coming of the Son of Man

The spiritual knowledge that we belong to God and are safe with God even as we live in a very destructive world allows us to see in the midst of all the turmoil, fear, and agony of history "the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory" (Luke 21:27). Even though Jesus speaks about this as about a final event, it is not just one more thing that is going to happen after all the terrible things are over. Just as the end-time is already here, so too is the coming of the Son of Man. It is an event in the realm of the Spirit and thus not subject to the boundaries of time.
Those who live in communion with Jesus have the eyes to see and the ears to hear the second coming of Jesus among them in the here and now. Jesus says: "Before this generation has passed away all will have taken place" (Luke 21:32). And this is true for each faithful generation.

- Henri Nouwen

Keeping It Together

How can we not lose our souls when everything and everybody pulls us in the most different directions? How can we "keep it together" when we are constantly torn apart?
Jesus says: "Not a hair of your head will be lost. Your perseverance will win you your lives" (Luke 21:18-19). We can only survive our world when we trust that God knows us more intimately than we know ourselves. We can only keep it together when we believe that God holds us together. We can only win our lives when we remain faithful to the truth that every little part of us, yes, every hair, is completely safe in the divine embrace of our Lord. To say it differently: When we keep living a spiritual life, we have nothing to be afraid of.

- Henri Nouwen

Compelled to Hide?

How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others... But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.

M. Scott Peck, "A Different Drum"

Remaining Faithful

Many people live with the unconscious or conscious expectation that eventually things will get better; wars, hunger, poverty, oppression, and exploitation will vanish; and all people will live in harmony. Their lives and work are motivated by that expectation. When this does not happen in their lifetimes, they are often disillusioned and experience themselves as failures.
But Jesus doesn't support such an optimistic outlook. He foresees not only the destruction of his beloved city Jerusalem but also a world full of cruelty, violence, and conflict. For Jesus there is no happy ending in this world. The challenge of Jesus is not to solve all the world's problems before the end of time but to remain faithful at any cost.

- Henri Nouwen

On The Journey Toward Celebrating Life

Some years ago, while doing mission work in the north delta of Mississippi (a very poor area of the United States), a group of students and I put a new roof on the home of an older woman. We had spent three days working and sweating on this roof in mid-July, and we had thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Miss Lizzy. Each day, with love, she would bring out ice-cold lemonade for us. She was so grateful that she would no longer have to strategically place buckets throughout her humble home to catch the water when it rained.
When we had finished, we moved our ladders and tools several blocks to another project. I remember walking down the middle of the street carrying a ladder and rejoicing in the pure goodness of life. And I rejoiced in the relationship I had developed with Miss Lizzy. I was aware of everything around me, and it brought tears to my eyes. All was right with the world at that moment.
In my mind I visit that time and place often, and it still brings tears of joy. It is among my most sacred memories of celebrating life and love. Understanding the fullness of life's simple joys and living in the "now" always reaps joy.

Victoria S. Schmidt

Dealing With Pain

Scott Peck began a best-selling book with a sentence only three words long: "Life is difficult." Life starts difficult, when we're forcibly pushed from the warm, soothing womb into the cold, glaring lights, then turned upside down and smacked. Life ends difficult, when we're struck down by cancer, emphysema, stroke, or old age. And every day in between has some degree of difficulty.
So very early on, we learn to soothe our pain [in a variety of inappropriate ways. We try all sorts of things.]...
But the bottom line is, we still have pain, because life is difficult. And that's where spirituality comes in. Richard Rohr, an author and retreat leader, says that "Spirituality is all about what you do with your pain." You can choose to medicate it [in inappropriate ways], or you can face it in God's presence. One path stifles growth, the other promotes it.

- Kevin A. Miller

Another, Possible World

People will not be driven by the automobile,
nor will they be programmed by computers,
nor will they be bought by supermarkets,
nor will they be watched by television sets…

Nobody will die of hunger,
because nobody will have indigestion.
Street children will not be treated as if they were trash,
because there will be no street children.
Rich kids will not be treated as if they were money,
because there will be no rich kids…

Eduardo Galeano, "Remembering"