“I cannot worry much about your sins and miseries when I have so many of my own. I can only love you all, poor fellow travelers, fellow sufferers. I do not want to add one least straw to the burden you already carry. My prayer from day to day is that God will so enlarge my heart that I will see you all, and live with you all, in love.” — Dorothy Day (from The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus)
Scariest verse from my reading this morning: “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.” (Matt. 22:29) Continue reading “Keep it simple”
Reading for today:
Ps. 30, 32, 42, 43
Ez. 49:21-29
Phil. 4:10-20
John 17:20-26 Continue reading “The withdrawing hand of God”
Reflections the day after another school shooting.
We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. Our biggest question then becomes, “Well, what do you mean by ‘love’?” Continue reading “The impossible task of defining “love””
“… I would argue that the instruction to love enemies is ‘the very genius of Christianity.’ And this ‘genius’ command mandates nothing less than that we are to demonstrate to all people the kind of love God demonstrated toward us while we were yet enemies (Rom. 5:10; Eph. 5:1-2). This is precisely why, after defining the kind of love that characterizes God by pointing us to Jesus’s death on the cross, John immediately adds: ‘And we ought to lay down our lives for one another’ (1 John 3:16, italics added).” — Greg Boyd, Crucifixion of the Warrior God
The discovery of the Creator is not only the belief in the First Cause… It is also — and first and foremost — the discovery of love. To create means not only to reveal power, omnipotence that surpasses all, but also it means: to give being, existence and goodness, therefore — to love! — Pope John Paul II, In God’s Hands: The Spiritual Diaries of Pope Saint John Paul II.
