“Faith is doing what may not be the most natural thing but is the right thing. It is the letting go of my personal will and putting it in God’s hands while still using the intellect and reasoning ability that God gave me at my birth to do what is right and what I should be doing.”
“We are, in fact, little icons of God, carrying the image of the Creator stamped on our souls. Each of us wondrous, complex, mystifying humans points in our very nature to the author of the cosmos.”
“Each time we gather for communion, we offer our gifts, which are then taken onto the altar—mundane, simple things like bread and wine, yes, but also we offer what we value—our monetary offerings and offerings of our selves: our time and our talents for the common good. Those offerings are then blessed, consecrated, made holy through the power of the Spirit to help empower us as disciples, both individually and as a community. Those gifts are then broken open—barriers and boundaries fall, so that true sharing can take place. And then those gifts are given back, yet somehow enlarged, made greater than their constituent parts.”
“Yes, there are words that hurt, especially when heard in the context of church and worship, but similarly there are words that speak God’s grace. It takes practice and forgiveness over and over again to be a church and a people who can speak words of love to everyone who enters.”
“Always the teacher, he wrote catechisms and books at a prodigious rate, trying to spread the Gospel through knowledge and understanding, but primarily through knowing Christ from the Gospels. His translation of Scripture into German, and beautiful German, may I add, was groundbreaking in that now the common person could read and meditate on the actual words.”
“As an adult I realized that the ritual of confession does more than wipe my slate clean for the week. It, and the entire communion service, serve to remind us of the things Jesus asks us to do in our daily life.”
“One of the disciplines or practices on which we’ve been working hard for the last few years is the use of the “I” statements. “I” statements are used to indicate our personal beliefs, thoughts, opinions, and positions, as opposed to “we” statements which lump us in with others who may or may not share our thoughts and beliefs.”
“So many times, we enter the mission field with the idea that we are somehow the bearers of bright and shiny–only to discover a world of dirty and messy, a world that seems impossible to fix.”
“Christ’s relationship with us, his followers, is a love story. His is self-sacrificing love of the most profound sort. He puts himself on the line again and again, hoping to hear a “yes” from us when he poses the life-giving choices.”
“Jesus spent his power on everybody. In his typically inclusive fashion, Luke reports that Jesus healed all who were sick. Not just some, but all.”