For the Joy of the Journey

Change
The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But the mystery of transformation more often happens not when something new begins, but when something old falls apart. The pain of something old falling apart—chaos—invites the soul to listen at a deeper level, and sometimes forces the soul to go to a new place.
Richard Rohr

…the ways we view and treat other people. 
Do we view them through the lens of sacrifice — that is, with a purity filter that sets boundaries, excluding and even expelling those we deem “unclean”? Or, do we use the filter of mercy, which follows the impulse to welcome, leading us to cross boundaries, to set aside our natural “disgust” for that which is outside our bounds of “acceptable” and to invite the other to participate in relationship with us?
Chaplin Mike

Communications Technology
The communications technology that was to become the concourse and meeting of all the world, bringing the longed-for peace to all the world, becomes a weapon to break the world in pieces.
Sabbath Poems – Wendell Berry

Apple Store conversations
I look around the store, packed with products that promise connection, and remark that it looks and feels like a temple. Turkle nods. She surveys the airy space, streaked with sunlight, bustling with people, and thunderous with the din of human voices. “Everybody’s talking,” she muses. “And nobody’s talking about anything except what’s on the machines.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-eavesdropper/355727/

Feelings
I suspect that feelings always played a bigger role in policymaking than we might like to think. I mean, FDR set the price of gold based on what numbers he thought were lucky.
Jonah Goldberg

Sunflowers
The sunflower, that plant which in shadow turns its head relentlessly toward the sun, is the patron saint of those in despair. When darkness descends on the soul, it is time, like the sunflower, to go looking for whatever good thing in life there is that can bring us comfort.
Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope

Grasping
If we did not grasp so tightly, it would not be so difficult to let go, true, but in the end it is not the grasping that is the problem. It is the inability to relax, to detach, to disengage long before this present debacle that takes us down. We have centered our lives in impermanence and failed to call it fleeting. We make one thing the definition of the self and when it goes, the core of us goes with it.
Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope

Grief
twelfth-century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi put it this way: I saw Grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out, “It tastes sweet, does it not?” “You’ve caught me,” Grief answered, “And you’ve ruined my business. How can I sell sorrow when you know it’s a blessing?”

Decline of Religion in America
By any measure, religiosity in America is declin­ing. As this report will show, since peaking in 1960, the share of American adults attending any religious service in a typical week has fallen from 50 per­cent to about 35 percent, while the share claimed as members by any religious body has fallen from over 75 percent to about 62 percent. Finally, the share of Americans who self-identify or report being affiliated with any religion has fallen from over 95 percent to about 75 percent. 
Promise and peril: The history of American religiosity and its recent decline.

Low Point
The lowest point in American religion, in terms of affiliation and church attendance, was in 1780.
Promise and peril: The history of American religiosity and its recent decline.

American Christianity
American Christianity makes salvation a personal commodity. It’s something you acquire through invocation–say the right prayer and you’re in. It places certain social and moral expectations on us, but it doesn’t infringe upon our liberty. No one can place expectations upon us. It’s an insurance policy we purchase that allows us to pursue the American dream without fear of our eternal future. 
Jayson Bradley

Patriotism
All that patriotism requires, and all that it can be,
is eagerness to maintain intact and incorrupt
the founding principles of the nation, and to preserve
undiminished the land and the people. If national conduct
forsakes these aims, it is one’s patriotic duty
to say so and oppose. What else have we to live for?
Wendell Berry

Opinions
We now have pocket-sized megaphones for our self-righteousness. The sheer number of opining voices confronting us on any given day is fathomless.
Around three billion of us globally are on social media. In the U.S., people spend an average of two hours per day on networking platforms — a total of one month a year, scrolling through catfights and cat photos.

Straw man Fallacy
The “Straw Man” fallacy is one where someone “deliberately misrepresents another person’s argument, re-frames it as something extreme and ridiculous, and then attacks that “Straw Man” instead.”

Winner of Sand sculpture contest

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT

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