Pieces of Work
Except that I’m just not really all that sure that God is all that concerned about being entertained. I’m not sure except that’s just a human thing. Sometimes you try to impress God with all the right words and I just don’t think it’s an easy thing to impress God Almighty. If you know what I mean. And here is the thing that I think we often forget – is that we don’t have to impress Him. Cause He’s already knocked out about you. He already loves you more than you can imagine.
I remember reading a thing that Picasso once said. I like to read what famous artists have to say because I’m barely able to look a their paintings without going into a coma trying to figure out what it’s about. But he said this one thing that I really did like. He said that good taste was the enemy of great art. Which I think is very, very true. Good taste has all to do with being cultured and being refined. If art has to do with anything, it has to do with being human. And one of the reasons I love the Bible is because the humans in the Bible are not very refined. They’re pretty goofy if you want to know the whole truth about it.
I remember when I was a kid and I was one of those typical depressed adolescent types. I wrote poetry and stuff. That’s how morose I was as a kid. People would go around saying, “Cheer up man because God Loves you!” I would always say, “Big deal! God loves everybody. That don’t make me special. That just proves that God ain’t got no taste.” And I don’t think He does. Thank God. Cause God takes the junk of our lives and He makes the greatest art in the world out of it. And if He was cultured – if He was as civilized as most Christian people wish He was – He would be useless to Christianity.
But God is a wild man. And, I hope that in the course of your life you encounter Him. But let me warn you, you need to hang on for dear life. Or, let go for dear life. Maybe is better.
- Rich Mullins
Godly Sorrow
It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it means that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is his splendor.
– Nicholas Wolterstorff
Sacred Sorrow
My first awareness of change within me came as I began to reflect on how I performed the mundane responsibilities from which I felt so alienated. Though I was not completely alive to them, I was able at least to think about them, if only from a distance. I was struck by how wonderfully ordinary life is. Simply being alive became holy to me. As I saw myself typing exams, chatting with a student on the way to class, or tucking one of my children into bed, I sensed I was beholding something sacred. My encounters with students presented astonishing opportunities to listen and encourage. Bedtime with Catherine, David, and John allowed me to convey the blessing and love of God to them. I was not yet fully alive to these ordinary moments, but I began to glimpse how profound they were.
In other words, though I experienced death, I also experienced life in ways that I never thought possible before – not after the darkness, as we might suppose, but in the darkness. I did not go through pain and come out the other side; instead, I lived in it and found within that pain the grace to survive and eventually grow. I did not get over the loss of my loved ones; rather, I absorbed the loss into my life, like soil receives decaying matter, until it became a part of who I am. Sorrow took up permanent residence in my soul and enlarged it. I learned gradually that the deeper we plunge into suffering, the deeper we can enter a new, and different, life – a life no worse than before and sometimes better. A willingness to face the loss and to enter into the darkness is the first step we must take. Like all first steps, it is probably the most difficult and takes the most time.
- Gerald L. Sittser, loser of his mother, wife and daughter in a car accident with a drunken driven. Taken from his book: A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss.
Memory
Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.
- Frederick Buechner
The Great Oncologist
Is God stern and angry, or warm and kind? In a sense, He is both. He is a father who delights in His child, so He therefore disciplines His child with a rebuke (Proverbs 3:11-12). Another contemporary image is the oncologist. He is a cancer specialist who will do anything to destroy that which destroys. He will surgically cut away flesh; He will burn out cells through radiation; and He will poison them with chemotherapy. The treatment is, at times, brutal and appears cruel, but the result is profoundly life-changing and lovely. Discipline, though it often feels like a judgment that exiles and abandons us, is a labor of love that beautifies the heart through the disruptive tough of a severe mercy.
- Dan Allender, Bold Love
Holy Fire
I have felt the holy fire of love
Been burned by the holy fire of love
Made clean by the holy fire of love
- Andrew Peterson, Resurrection Letters: Vol II
Distance
What is most close, most intimate, most present, often cannot be experienced directly but only with a certain distance…. Only in retrospect do I realize that something very important has taken place. Isn’t this true of all really important events in life? When I am together with someone I love very much we seldom talk about our relationship. The relationship, in fact, is too central to be a subject of talk. But later, after we have separated and write letters, we realize how much it means to us, and we even write about it.
- Henri Nouwen, The Genesse Diary
All that ever was
What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.
- Frederick Buechner
Passing Shadows
It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.
- Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Don’t Be Fooled
Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can’t get any better, it can.
- Nicholas Sparks