Stories.
We are defined by our stories.
We live by our stories.
But our stories are not static.
They are constantly shifting, changing, and growing.
The key thing about our stories is that they are dynamic.
They are filled with moments.
Moments of joy.
Moments of pain.
Moments of love.
Moments of loss.
And the most beautiful moments of them all: moments of hope.
As a dear friend and teacher of mine once said, "When we create stories, we create worlds. Change the story, and you change the world."
So hear is a slice of my changing, dynamic story.
I hope you enjoy it and I hope to hear your stories as well.
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As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind—the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing… . It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons… . What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?G.K. Chesterton
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Why do you want a letter from me? Why don’t you take the trouble to find out for yourselves what Christianity is? You take time to learn technical terms about electricity. Why don’t you do as much for theology? Why do you never read the great writings on the subject, but take your information from the secular ‘experts’ who have picked it up as inaccurately as you? Why don’t you learn the facts in this field as honestly as your own field? Why do you accept mildewed old heresies as the language of the church, when any handbook on church history will tell you where they came from?
Why do you balk at the doctrine of the Trinity - God the three in One - yet meekly acquiesce when Einstein tells you E=mc2? What makes you suppose that the expression “God ordains” is narrow and bigoted, while your own expression, “Science demands” is taken as an objective statement of fact?
You would be ashamed to know as little about internal combustion as you know about Christian beliefs.
I admit, you can practice Christianity without knowing much theology, just as you can drive a car without knowing much about internal combustion. But when something breaks down in the car, you go humbly to the man who understands the works; whereas if something goes wrong with religion, you merely throw the works away and tell the theologian he is a liar.
Why do you want a letter from me telling you about God? You will never bother to check on it or find out whether I’m giving you personal opinions or Christian doctrines. Don’t bother. Go away and do some work and let me get on with mine.Dorothy L. Sayers
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Quote reblogged from Wit & Wisdom: G.K. Chesterton QuotesThere is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.
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Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.
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Quote reblogged from Wit & Wisdom: G.K. Chesterton QuotesI am a man, and therefore have all devils in my heart.
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Quote reblogged from Wit & Wisdom: G.K. Chesterton QuotesReason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.
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Quote reblogged from Wit & Wisdom: G.K. Chesterton QuotesTo have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
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I’ve been thinking about prayer recently. What it means, what it does, if my prayers are heard. The more I grow as a follower of Jesus and the more I wrestle with my faith and seek to understand it, often times the more mysterious (in a good way) it becomes.
Its kind of like this with prayer. The more I think about it, the more I try and understand it, the less I know about it. But as I understand less about how prayer works the more I realize how incredibly important it is.
How important it is to pray when you don’t feel like it, when you wonder what good it does, when you wonder if Anyone is listening.
I’m finding that is when it is all the more important to pray. To talk to Jesus. To ask him for help. To ask him to send his Spirit when you have no wind left in your sails. To talk to the God who is beyond all words.
The more I think about prayer, the more I think Frederick Buechner provided one of the best explanations of it in his novel, Godric:
“What’s prayer? It’s shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who’s to say? It’s reaching for a hand you cannot touch. The silence is so fathomless that prayers like plummets vanish into the sea. You beg. You whimper. You load God down with empty praise. You tell him sins that he already knows full well. You seek to change his changeless will. Yet Godric prays the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast. Prayer is the wind that fills his sail. Else drift with witless tides. And sometimes, by God’s grace, a prayer is heard.”
Shooting shafts into the dark, and sometimes by God’s grace one of them being heard…
I don’t fully understand prayer, and I probably never will. But I am beginning to understand how incredibly important our prayers are, both to God and to the very life of our Spirit-filled existence.
Those are some of my (and Frederick Buechner’s) thoughts on prayer.
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Quote reblogged from Wit & Wisdom: G.K. Chesterton QuotesThe most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.
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http://robbellcom.tumblr.com/post/47703174573/heres-a-bit-from-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about
When people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-
hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren’t taking the entire world into account.
A brief reading of modern science quite quickly takes us into all sorts of…
