Change we can believe in...

The quote was taken from the preface of a play by John Patrick Shanley that was also made into a movie currently in theaters.  I like how the writer acknowledges that it can often be a frustrating, scary, and painful experience for us to truly change, but we have to do it anyway.  

"It is Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things.  When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he's on the verge of growth.  The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and the inner core often seems at first like a mistake, like you've gone the wrong way and you're lost.  But this is just emotion longing for the familiar.  Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind.  Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present."

- John Patrick Shanley

Doubt: a parable

"Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides.  You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors.  So don't try to get out of anything prematurely.  Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way."

- James 1: 2-4 (The Message)

Selah.

- S.  

Left holding the bag...

I find the following quote particularly insightful as more of us wake up to the toxic consequences of political and religious divisions that are based more on convincing others we are right than actually BEING and DOING right in our own lives.

"It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty with no trace of meaning left in it.  And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic.

Gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people.  The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real.  In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."

- Thomas Merton

"Just then a relgious scholar stood up with a question to test Jesus.  "Teacher, what do I need to do to get eternal life?"  

He answered, "What's written in God's Law?  How do you interpret it?"

He said, "That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence - and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself."

"Good answer!" said Jesus.  "Do it and you'll live."

- Luke 10: 25 - 28 (The Message)

Selah.

- S.

Apocalypse Now and Later...

The following passage from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis is particularly insightful in light of current events and the days of reckoning that lie ahead for the people of the United States.  

"... I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does.  When that happens, it is the end of the world.  When the author walks on to the stage the play is over.  God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else -- something it never entered your head to conceive -- comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left?  For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature.  It will be too late then to choose your side.  There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up.  That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not.  Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side.  God is holding back to give us that chance.  It will not last for ever.  We must take it or leave it."  

 "If you decide that it's a bad thing to worship God, then choose a god you'd rather serve—and do it today. Choose one of the gods your ancestors worshiped from the country beyond The River, or one of the gods of the Amorites, on whose land you're now living. As for me and my family, we'll worship God."  

- Joshua 24:14  (The Message)

- S.