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

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

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!

Comprehensiveness of Sin

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

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

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

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

St. Augustine

How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose and was now glad to reject! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood, you who outshine all light yet are hidden deeper than any secret in our hearts, you who surpass all honor though not in the eyes of men who see all honor in themselves. At last my mind was free from the gnawing anxieties of ambition and gain, from wallowing in filth and scratching the itching sore of lust. I began to talk to you freely, O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation.

Psalm 23

The Lord is my constant companion.
There is no need that He cannot fulfill.
Whether His course for me points
to the mountaintops of glorious joy
or to the valleys of human suffering,
He is by my side.
He is ever present with me.
He is close beside me
when I read the dark streets of danger,
and even when I flirt with death itself,
He will not leave me.
When the pain is severe,
He is near to comfort.
When the burden is heavy
He is there to lean upon.
When depression darkens my soul,
He touches me with eternal joy.
When I feel empty and alone,
He fills the aching vacuum with His power.
My security is in His promise
to be near me always
an in the knowledge
that He will never let me go.

From Psalms/Now by Leslie F. Brandt

Piper

Helping you embrace the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

A Praying Life, Paul E. Miller

p.10
The best our world has to offer is to teach you how to talk to yourself. Change what you tell yourself, and your feelings about what happened will change. Change your self-talk, and how you feel about yourself will change. Talk yourself out of getting upset about what you can't change. Do something constructive about what you can change. Those are the world's best efforts. It's a familiar but abnormal way to live.
- David Powlison

p. 20
Prayer is simply the medium through which we experience and connect to God.

p. 22
If God is sovereign, then he is in control of all the details of my life. If he is loving, then he is going to be shaping the details of my life for my good. If he is all-wise, then he's not going to do everything I want because I don't know what I need. If he is patient, then he is going to take time to do all this. When we put all these things together - God's sovereignty, love, wisdom, and patience - we have a divine story.

Unanswered prayers create some of the tensions in the story God is weaving in our lives.

If God is composing a story with our lives, then our lives are no longer static. We aren't paralyzed by life; we can hope.

We dull our souls with the narcotic of activity. The quest for a contemplative life can actually be self-absorbed, focused on my quiet and me. If we love people and have the power to help, then we are going to be busy. Learning to pray doesn't offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart. In the midst of the outer busyness we can develop an inner quiet.

p. 24
Love changes us. The second person of the Trinity, Jesus of Nazareth, now has a scarred body. The Trinity is different because of love.

Repentance, JI Packer

"Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged."
—J.I. Packer
Keep in Step with the Spirit, page 87

“Who am I?” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Who am I?”
By Dietrich Bonhoeffer (March 4, 1945)

Who am I? They often tell me
I would step from my cell’s confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me
I would talk to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me
I would bear the days of misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I know of myself?
restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
trembling in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine.

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Who am I?” in Letters & Papers From Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1953/1997), 347-8.

Ann Voskamp

Time is a relentless river and it rages on, respecter of no one.

And the only way to slow time is this: Enter fully into the current moment and the stream of time slows — slows — with the weight of a soul’s full attention.

We slow the torrent by being all here.

Life at its fullest is this sensitive, detonating sphere, and it can be carried only in the hands of the unhurried and reverential—a bubble held in awe.”

Ann Voskamp, author of "A Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are"

Letters to God

"I want him to know I'm not mad at him and that I understand why he makes fun of me. Mr. Perryfield says it's because I'm God's warrior and I make him feel things he doesn't want to feel. But that's good, because maybe he'll turn to God for the answers. Or something like that."

 from the movie "Letters to God"

Rabbi Kahane

For so long as the Jew has even one ally, he will be convinced...that his salvation came from that ally. It is only when he is alone- against all of his own efforts and frantic attempts- that he will, through no choice, be compelled to turn to God."
Rabbi Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League in the United States

Bertrand Russel

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

Loyalties in Philly

"We are, like, straight-up loyal. Even if you and I are not agreeing on something, but we're both from Philly and someone is picking on you. I would beat the crap out of that person. We have each others' backs." - M. Night Shyamalan