Category: Notes Anthology

Love your neighbor as yourself
Question to ask.
How would you know you are loving your neighbor as yourself?
Sean Palmer

Marriage
Marriage is not a hierarchical, power-oriented relationship. Paul takes great care here to define marriage as a mutually submissive and mutually beneficial relationship. Each belongs to the other. One cannot claim a debt on the other, yet each can assert their indebtedness to the other. In marriage, it’s always, “I owe you,” and never “You owe me.”
J D Walt

Feeling Offended
“The feeling of offendedness is invigorating. . . . But we must never settle for it. We must not confuse an accelerated pulse rate for the presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. We must interrogate our offendedness, hold it open for question. . . . If we’re more opposed, for instance, for what we take to be ‘bad language’ and nude scenes and films about gay people than we are to people being blown up, starved to death, deprived of life-saving medicine, or tortured, our offendedness is out of whack. We have yet to understand the nature of real perversion. . . . “Feeling offended is a reassuring sensation. It’s easier than asking ourselves if the redeeming love of God is evident in the way we communicate with people” 
David Dark

Add a little grace
In the play The Man of La Mancha Don Quixote said on his deathbed, “I just wanted to add a measure of grace to the world.”

Viewpoints
Viewpoints are not explorations of truth; they are weapons that dominant groups use to maintain their place in the power structure. Words can thus be a form of violence that has to be regulated.
David Brooks

Terrifying
Few things are more terrifying in the spiritual arena than those who absolutely know but who are also unloving, hostile, proud, superstitious and fearful.
Dalles Willard 

Good manners
Manners play all sorts of important functions in society, but near the top of the list is that they’re the way we show respect to other people. Americans are an extremely egalitarian people, so it’s no surprise that we have done away with nearly all of the forms of good manners that suggest one person is better than another person. 
Jonah Goldberg

How are You?
“How are you?” These are the three most useless words in the world of communication. The person asking doesn’t really want to know, and the person responding doesn’t tell the truth. What follows is a lost opportunity and meaningless exchange with zero connection.
Harvard Business Review

Those who commit evil
The poor in spirit do not commit evil. Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin in because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination. 
The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.

Unless we can now tame and transmute the potential for evil in the human soul, we shall be lost. How can we do this unless we are willing to look at our own evil?
M. Scott Peck – People of the Lie

Slogans
The problem with slogans is they are propaganda. They are meant to do something besides say what you believe. They are more marketing than anything else. And because they are terse, they can be used to mean many things by a variety of people. And that can cause confusion. And what do you think about the ones who will not use the slogan you think is needed? Will you assume the best of them? Also, slogans are usually for a moment or a movement and not for the long haul over a lifetime. We ought to be very cautious with them.
Matt Redmond

Love Like Jesus
If you want to love like Jesus loved when he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” I recommend starting with the cars that cut you off as you drive to and from work.
Matt Redmond

Joy in the Journey
Lifted from David French’s Sunday post

Joy in the Journey
Michael Card

There is a joy in the journey,
There’s a light we can love on the way.
There is a wonder and wildness to life,
And freedom for those who obey.
All those who seek it shall find it,
A pardon for all who believe.
Hope for the hopeless and sight for the blind
To all who’ve been born of the Spirit
And who share incarnation with him;
Who belong to eternity, stranded in time,
And weary of struggling with sin.
Forget not the hope
That’s before you,
And never stop counting the cost.
Remember the hopelessness when you were lost?

Source: LyricFind

Discovery of the Week,

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT

 A better future
…if you start from the philosophical premise that the past has nothing to teach you and the present is just the poisoned fruit of the past, you’re not destined to recreate something better. You’re virtually guaranteed to recreate something worse
Jonah Goldberg

Some day
…making ourselves imperious so that there will never be a doubt in anyone’s mind who is the god of the day, the messiah of the moment, the king of the mountain, the goddess of heaven, the person in charge, the abbot, the boss, the president, the power. But down deep, that may be the most powerless position of all. If we refuse to ask for help, if we distance ourselves from the strengths of others, if we cling to the myths of authority and power where trust is needed, we leave out a piece of life. We condemn ourselves to ultimate failure because someday, somewhere, we will meet up with the thing we cannot do and our whole public self will depend on our being able to do it.
From “Scarred by trouble, Transformed by hope.”

The Crowd
The passions of crowds often seem to empower a group to do something that a single individual would never dare or even wish. There is an anonymity that comes about in which personhood begins to be obscured and lost. It is a dangerous episode in the life of any nation, regardless of the cause.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Courage
Courage is not nearly so rare a quality as we sometimes like to think it is. We forgive ourselves the responsibility to muster it on the grounds that it is the unwonted virtue of unusual people in momentous circumstances. The truth is that courage is what carries simple people through an average day. It is not an action; it is an attitude. It is the spiritual strength that gives direction in the midst of confusion. It is no more uncommon than fear. It is, in fact, the child of fear.
Joan Chisttister

Common Ground
The first and most basic area of common ground is that we are all made in the image of God. Without agreement on this most basic assertion there can be no agreement on anything else. …The denial of that fundamental equality, in thought or  practice, is not simply a denial of the stated laws of most modern nation states, it is a denial of God’s work in creation and of Christ’s Incarnation.
Phoenix Preacher

Speak to be heard
“you must speak (or write) in a way that people can hear you.” If you simply write to offend, no one will listen other than people who already agree with you. It seems that many don’t care anymore if anyone can hear them or not, they just love the sound of their own voices and the offense they create…
Phoenix Preacher

Listening
Younger people realize you haven’t been listening. It’s not the position people hold that is offensive. It is the fact you don’t value people and their view point enough to be able to articulate it to other people. You aren’t capable of the hard work of listening, the reason is you’re not humble.
We are led by people who have always been in power. When you are in power you don’t have to listen, people do what you want.
Josh Graves

Internet
The internet is a biopsy of the human soul. A context where what is inside of us is pulled out of us and is made public, revealing any malignancy within us.
Erwin McManus

Preaching the Gospel
Preaching the the Gospel does not begin with being verbal. You can not talk people into love, surrender, love of truth. We must be verbalizing experience and experience that doesn’t ring true won’t go far.
Richard Rohr

The Mind of Christ
To get the mind of Christ we must practice, practice, practice.
Landon Saunders

Free Advice

So much to think about.