“Abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together to celebrate and share our common store. Whether the scarce resource is money or love or power or words, the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around. Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them—and receive them from others when we are in need.”  (Parker Palmer in Let Your Life Speak)

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“What causes us to compete and measure and calculate, even when God doesn’t seem overly concerned about such things? Questions like who is ahead and who is behind, who is doing God’s work (whatever we determine that to be) and who is not, cause the spirit to yawn in boredom and long for something more. To enliven the spirit, we reason that we will get busy and do something. If it is good to give a cup of water to a child, then how much better it will be to give thousands of cups of water to thousands of children, more cups than anyone else has ever given before. Let’s keep track! Let’s prove we are excelling and have earned our place among the greatest of the great. Let’s stand out and be noticed and be deemed worthy. . . . Jesus urges us to make peace with ourselves. Better to have half of our life fully engaged and dedicated to bringing God’s spirit into the world than to be wholly made up of accusations and doubt. Better to do what we can than to fault others for what they are doing.” (Kayla McClurg, Inward, Outward website)

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“Most of our conflicts and difficulties come from trying to deal with the spiritual and practical aspects of our life separately instead of realizing them as parts of one whole. If our practical life is centered on our own interests, cluttered up by possessions, distracted by ambitions, passions, wants and worries, beset by a sense of our own rights and importance, or anxieties for our own future, or longings for our own success, we need not expect that our spiritual life will be a contrast to all this. The soul’s house is not built on such a convenient plan; there are few sound-proof partitions in it.” (Evelyn Underhill in The Spiritual Life)

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“Just as we are committed to being on an inward journey for all of time, so are we committed to being on an outward journey, so that the inner and the outer become related to one another and one has meaning for the other and helps to make the other possible. If engagement with ourselves does not push back horizons so that we see neighbors we did not see before, then we need to examine the appointment kept with self. If prayer does not drive us out into some concrete involvement at a point of the world’s need, then we must question prayer. If the community does not deliver us from false securities and safe opinions and known ways, then we must cry out against that community, for it betrays.” (By Elizabeth O’Connor in Journey Inward Journey Outward)