“We have places of fear inside of us, but we have other places as well—places with names like trust and hope and faith. We can choose to lead from one of those places, to stand on ground that is not riddled with the fault lines of fear, to move toward others from a place of promise instead of anxiety. As we stand in one of those places, fear may remain close at hand and our spirits may still tremble. But now we stand on ground that will support us, ground from which we can lead others toward a more trustworthy, more hopeful, more faithful way of being in the world.  (By Parker Palmer in Let Your Life Speak).

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“What would it look like for Christians to truly be servant leaders? To start, it would involve looking at our society’s inequitable structures and acknowledging the ways we who hold power benefit from and even maintain these structures. For many of us, this journey would be the beginning of a small death”  (By Christena Cleveland in Christianity Today, November, 2015).

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“A quote from my friend Robert speaks so strongly and deeply to my predicament: ‘Busyness is greed.’ By filling my life with events, activities, and responsibilities that far exceed the boundaries God has set for humans to function well, I am being greedy. Greedy for experiences and accomplishments that are unrealistic. Greedy for pleasing others and being acknowledged. In a very real sense I’m trying to escape my own mortality by trying to do more than God intended for me. . . .

. . . .  As we seek to make conscious decisions about how we spend our time and order our schedules, it is important to bring a generosity to our boundaries, both in our time and emotions. Do not mistake the practice of always saying ‘yes’ to others as a form of service; quite the opposite can be true. Often our obsession with people-pleasing is rooted in selfishness. Many of us were conditioned from birth that our worth and identity is based on what we are doing, achieving, and ultimately what people think about us. When we set boundaries for our commitments, our motives for trying to do more than what is healthy begin to bubble up, thus revealing our underlying desires and insecurities” (Nathan Foster in Heart to Heart for November, 2015, on the Renovare website).

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“Patience is an ever-present alternative to the mind’s endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or some thing for it. This doesn’t mean you can’t hurry when you have to. It is possible even to hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast because you have chosen to”  (Jon Kabat-Zinn in Wherever You Go There You Are).