Continuing the collection from my emails during Jordan and Joshua's medical trials:
"True faith does not so much attempt to manipulate God to do our will as it does to position us to do his will." (Philip Yancey)
"The Bible never belittles human disappointment (remember the proportion in the book of Job--one chapter of restoration follows forty-one chapters of anguish), but it does add one key word: temporary. What we feel now, we will not always feel. Our disappointment is itself a sign, an aching, a hunger for something better. And faith is, in the end, a kind of homesickness--for a home we have never visited but have never once stopped longing for." (Philip Yancey)
"That light at the end of the tunnel? That really is light!" (Tony Giles)
"Pretending is the grease of modern non-relationships. Pretending perpetuates the illusion of relationships by connecting us on the basis of who we aren't. People who pretend have pretend relationships. But being real is a synonym for messy spirituality, because when we are real, our messiness is there for everyone to see...[T]he truth is, we are a mess. None of us is who we appear to be. We all have secrets. We all have issues. We all struggle from time to time. No one is perfect. No one. The essence of messy spirituality is the refusal to pretend, to lie, or to allow someone to believe something we are not...When you and I stop pretending, we expose the pretending of everyone else. The bubble of the perfect Christian life is burst, and we all must face the reality of our brokenness." (Mike Yaconelli)
"Life is the living of the Mystery. As one Greek Orthodox theologian puts it, 'We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us more progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.' What are doctrines but vestibules to the mysteries? To follow Jesus is not a paint-by-numbers path. To follow Jesus is to live the adventure and experience the mystery of faith." (Leonard Sweet)
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