“Detachment is often understood as letting loose of what is attractive. But it sometimes also requires letting go of what is repulsive. You can indeed become attached to dark forces such as resentment and hatred. As long as you seek retaliation, you cling to your own past. Sometimes it seems as though you might lose yourself along with your revenge and hate—so you stand there with balled-up fists, closed to the other who wants to heal you” (Henri Nouwen, You are the Beloved).

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 “. . . .  Christ is alive and active. He continues to speak and teach. His voice is not hard to hear. His vocabulary is not difficult to understand. He will teach us. Now Jesus is a living Savior and the salvation that is in him includes teaching us how to live and re-forming our very selves. Dallas Willard puts it well: ‘I am learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live my life if he were I.'”

And so, today, God is calling you and me to accept Jesus as our life. We are to trust Him for all things. We are to band together as his disciples, learning from him how to live and being formed by God, through Christ and the Holy Spirit, into the kinds of people capable of this transformed life. This is the salvation that is in Jesus Christ” (Richard Foster, quoted in the Renovare Weekly Digest,” August 5-9, 2019).

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“Be importunate, Jesus says—not, one assumes, because you have to beat a path to God’s door before he’ll open it, but because until you beat the path maybe there’s no way of getting to your door. “Ravish my heart,” John Donne wrote. But God will not usually ravish. He will only court.” (Frederick Buechner Wishful Thinking).

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“Saintliness means living without division between word and action. If I would truly live in my own life the word I am speaking, my spoken words would become actions, and miracles would happen whenever I open my mouth” (Henri Nouwen, You are the Beloved).

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“Are [Christians] getting their view of refugees from Christian sources? Or are they getting their view from Fox News, talk radio, and Donald Trump.  I suspect the latter.  And the worship of political idols is ultimately a spiritual problem – a different kind of blasphemy.

These challenges run deeper than politics. Many white evangelicals hold a faith that appeals to the comfortable rather than siding with the afflicted. They have allied themselves with bigots and nativists, risking the reputation of the Gospel itself.  And, in some very public ways they are difficult to recognize as Christians at all” (Michael Gerson quoted in the Holland Sentinel).

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“A problem is a chance for you to do your best” (Duke Ellington).