I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep.
From all of our beginnings, we keep reliving the Garden story.
The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world.
On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgement and effort to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.
This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there’s this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity.
Christian hands never claspand He doesn’t give gifts for gainbecause a gift can never stop being a gift – it is always meant to be given.
A life contemplating the blessings of Christ becomes a life acting the love of Christ.
…the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt He is.
Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.
The practice of giving thanks…eucharisteo…this is the way we practice the presence of God, stay present to His presence, and it is always a practice of the eyes. We don’t have to change what we see. Only the way we see.
Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will.
Who would ever know the greater graces of comfort and perserverance, mercy and forgiveness, patience and courage, if no shadows fell over a life?
Thanksgiving-giving thanks in everything-prepares the way that God might show us His fullest salvation in Christ.
The true Love Dare. To move into His presence and listen to His love unending and know the grace uncontainable. This is the vault of the miracles. The only thing that can change us, the world, is this- all His love.
At the last, this is what will determine a fulfilling, meaningful life, a life that, behind all the facades, every one of us longs to live: gratitude for the blessings that expresses itself by becoming the blessing.
When we stop fearing failure, we start being artists.
Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.
Just that maybe … maybe you don’t want to change the story, because you don’t know what a different ending holds.
Forget the face of God, and forget your own name is Beloved.
The highest form of prayer is to the goodness of God. . . . God only desires that our soul cling to him with all of its strength, in particular, that it clings to his goodness.
But, someone, please give me—who is born again but still so much in need of being born anew—give me the details of how to live in the waiting cocoon before the forever begins?
Who would ever know the greater graces of comfort and perseverance, mercy and forgiveness, patience and courage, if no shadows fell over a life?
When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us?
Stress isn’t only a joy stealer. The way we respond to it can be sin.
Is the height of my chara joy dependent on the depths of my eucharisteo thanks?
Awe ignites joy because it makes us bend the knee.
While I may not always feel joy, God asks me to give thanks in all things because He knows that the feeling of joy begins in the action of thanksgiving.
Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy. (Page 57)
How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering. The converse does. (Page 58)
… be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness…
I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment.
Trust is the bridge from yesterday to tomorrow, built with planks of thanks.
Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.
How to ‘live’ in a state of awe when life is mundane and ordinary?
To get where you want to go, the first question you always have to answer is Where am I? … We only find out where we are when we find out where He is. We only find ourselves… when we find Him.
That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.
Could a name be any shorter? Three letters without even the flourish of an e. Ann, a trio of curves and lines.It means “full of grace”.
I speak the unseen into seeing and I can feel it, this steady breathing in the rhythm of grace–‘give thanks (in), give thanks (out)’.
We ‘have’ all received on grace after another, but we only recognize the glory of God in this moment ‘when we wake to the one grace after another’.
That is what a shadow is, and empty space, a hole in the light. Evil is this – a hole in the goodness of God.
Do I really smother my own joy because I believe that anger achieves more than love?
The only way to fight a feeling is with a feeling.
The parent must always self-parent first, self-preach before child-teach, because who can bring peace unless they’ve held their own peace?
How can I help this son of mine see when I can’t see? The parent must always self-parent first, self-preach before child-teach, because who can bring peace unless they’ve held their own peace?
Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.
And it’s the ‘Word of God’ that turns the rocks in the mouth to loaves on the tongue. That fills our emptiness with the true and real good, ‘that makes the eyes see’, the body full of light.
I wear the lens of the Word and all the world transfigures into the Beauty of Christ and ‘everything is eucharisteo’.
Sometimes you don’t know when you’re taking the first step through a door until you’re already inside.
Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.
Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant—a seed—this plants the giant miracle.
Life-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time.
If the heights of our joy are measured by the depths of our gratitude, and gratitude is but a way of seeing, a spiritual perspective of smallness might offer a vital way of seeing especially conducive to gratitude
Every moment I live, I live bowed to something. And if I don’t see God, I’ll bow down before something else.
Wherever you are, be all there.” I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.
Sometimes, too often, I don’t want to muster the energy. Stress and anxiety seem easier.
I know the theological answers, but do my blood and my pulse?
Why do I lunge for control instead of joy?…do I thin Jesus grace too impotent to give me the full life…Whenever I am blind to joys well, isn’t it because I don’t believe in Gods care? P 130
Eucharisteo has taught me to trust that there is always enough God. He has no end.
The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life – in my life – is lack of thanksgiving.
God can enter into me, even me, and use these hands, these feet, to be His love, a love that goes on and on and on forever, endless cycle of grace.
I am a mother-tired, but when my soul doth magnify, my time doth magnify.
Communion, by necessity, always leads us into community.
All those years thinking I was saved and had said my yes to God, but was really living the no.
Long, I am woman who speaks but one language, the language of the fall–discontentment and self-condemnation, the critical eye and the never satisfied.
Count blessings and discover Who can be counted on.
Can God be counted on? Count blessings and find out how many of His bridges have already held.
When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.
Daily discipline is the door to full freedom, and the discipline to count to one thousand gave way to the freedom of wonder and I can’t imagine not staying awake to God in the moment, the joy in the now.
I think the fall in Eden was ultimately a failure to give thanks.
Adults are tempted to produce and perform Christmas for their kids and their families, and they arrive at Christmas Day weary and disillusioned.
A simplified Christmas isn’t about circumstances as much as it is about focus.
Romance isn’t measured by how viral your proposal goes. The Internet age may try to sell you something different, but don’t ever forget that viral is closely associated with sickness – so don’t ever make being viral your goal.
Get this, kids – how a man proposes isn’t what makes him romantic. It’s how a man purposes to lay down his life that makes him romantic.