Dinner is a cacophonous exercise of holy sanctification.
Desire, if it is to be trusted, is to be inspired by a holy vocabulary.
The phrases of the Lord’s Prayer, “are words we pray, not always because we believe them, but because we WANT to believe them.
Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us.
We prefer the not wanting and not having to the losing.
Grace has as much to say about endings as it does about beginnings.
Only he who cries out for the persecuted Jews can sing Gregorian chants. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
How do you fill the space between, “God says it,” and, “I believe it,”?
The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.
Blessing and obedience do comfortably and mysteriously coexist.
Holy desire can be learned. All prayer is part work and part rest.
Our small group is committed to getting the biblical text under our skin.
After her initial conversion as a teenager, the author writes, “I was sent back into a world that no longer looked familiar to me. I had to relearn how to do everything.
I didn’t know how faith felt when it grew incrementally.
God is the I AM that I AM not the I AM that we wish.
According to Aquinas, effort may not be the best measure of our virtue.
Sticks and stones may break your bones, and words – can cut your insides.
Believing in the sovereignty of God injects courage in the act of desire.
We all have a tendency to use prayer to dictate to God.