Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Prayer is not the end goal.

Then one of my seeJesus coworkers said: “Prayer is not the end goal. Prayer is the conduit to Jesus.” That was it. That one sentence changed everything. When prayer is the end goal, then the means to that goal is teaching people how to pray. When Jesus is the end goal, then knowing, doing life with, and loving Him becomes the target. Life changing! That lens change has led to more joy than I ever thought. 


-from Paul Miller's seeJesus email update

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

The Middles

Na'arah = young lady. With two daughters plunging into double digits, I'm reminded of a quote that I chant to myself almost every single day. "I think middles are middles. In the beginning of parenting, the exhaustion is mitigated by the excitement and hope of all new beginnings. Plus baby cuteness. At the end, the burdens of young adult issues and the poignancy of growing up and parting are mitigated by the amazement and joy of seeing who your children have become, and hopefully some relief from the daily parenting press. In the middle you don't have either of those, and it's time for getting up every day and faithfully going on - perseverance, laying down your life, and the weariness of feeling like you're saying the same thing over and over, and yes, to people who don't seem to like all that much a lot of times. But there in that vital crucible of the middle, people are being shaped and formed. In the middle, children are being crafted into beautiful vessels - and so are their parents." Kristin Wong

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Man's desires can now be developed so that they will greatly overshadow his needs.  Of course there exists theoretically that danger point when consumption is reached its limit but such a breaking point is probably non-existant.  Human desire seems to have no limit.  Educate the world to want and the production capacity of the country will groan under the burden of enormous demand.  There may be limits to the consumption of particular products.  There is no theoretical limit to general consumption possibilities.

-Paul Mazur
Wall Street banker for Lehman Brothers
1928!

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Comprehensiveness of Sin

The comprehensiveness of sin is mirrored much clearer against the comprehensiveness of the law.
-Steve Telian

Monday, July 21, 2014

The Whole Earth Groans - Romans 8:19-22

When God gives up the world to futility, he did not do so vindictively but redemptively.  He allows us to live on our own, in our own futility.  This is severe mercy.

God cannot trust us to the full knowledge of His ways.
-Chuck Jacob

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Nicholas Wolterstorff

"If sympathy for the world's wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, 
if love for those around us is not expanded, 
if gratitude for what is good does not flame up, 
if insight is not deepened, 
if commitment to what is important is not strengthened, 
if aching for a new day is not intensified,
if hope is weakened and faith diminished,
if from the experience of death comes nothing good, then death has won. Then death, be proud.
So I shall struggle to live the reality of Christ's rising and death's dying."
-Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son, p. 92-93

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

David Wells on Prayer

Prayer is rebellion against the world in its fallenness, the absolute and undying refusal, to accept as normal what is so perversely broken.
-David Wells