I know enough about Christ to realize that He focused more on action than on persuasive words. He spent little time convincing and much time proclaiming.

Beauty hurts. It hurts to look at it and it hurts to hear it. I cannot remember the last time I left a service with the ache of beauty in my chest. We need more of that in the house of God.

I was raised to believe that the quality of a man’s life would greatly increase, not with the gain of status or success, not by his heart’s knowing romance or by prosperity in industry or academia, but by his nearness to God. It confuses me that Christian living is not more simple. The gospel, the very good news, is simple, but this is the gate; the trailhead. Ironing out faithless creases is toilsome labor. God bestows three blessings on man: to feed him like birds, dress him like flowers, and befriend him as a confidant. Too many take the first two and neglect the last. Most believers on the path have found that life is constructed specifically and brilliantly to squeeze a man into association with the owner of heaven. It is a struggle, with labor pains and thorny landscape, bloody hands and sweaty brow, head in hands, ache and desire. All this leads to God. God is not merely the reason behind existence, nor the curer of ills and confusion. Matter and thought are a canvas in which God paints; a painting with tragedy and delivery, with sin and redemption. Life is a dance towards God. And the dance is not so graceful as we might think. For a while we glide and swing our practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. He lowers His head, whispers soft and confident, “You will dance to the beat of ‘Amazing Grace’ or you will not dance at all.” So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a taxing dance to learn

But once learned, don’t we glide. And don’t we sway. And don’t we bury our head in His chest. And don’t we love to dance.

-Donald Miller, Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance

“And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.”

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

“All here’s true. . . All’s at stake. . . All here’s true.”

A few favorite quotes from Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis. . .

“Some say the loving and the devouring are all the same thing.”

“That Greek there is your slave because in some battle he threw down his arms and let them bind his hands and lead him away and sell him, rather than take a spear-thrust in his heart. Much less does it give them understanding of holy things. They demand to see such things clearly, as if the gods were no more than letters written in a book. I, King, have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from. . . my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me.”

“If this is all true, I’ve been wrong all my life. Everything has to be begun over again.”

"There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve. It must therefore die."

Thomas Merton from Thoughts in Solitude

"Once we start the spiritual journey, God is totally on our side."

"True asceticism is not the rejection of the world, but the acceptance of everything that is good, beautiful, true."

"That is true detachment- accepting everything that God wants us to accept and letting go of everything that God wants us to let go of, at a moment's notice."

Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love

We are shaped by our experiences. Our perception of joy, fear, pain, and beauty are sharpened or dulled by the way we rub against time. My senses have become dull and this trip is an effort to sharpen them. . .

Worship is not just something we feel. It is something we sweat. It is an editing of the soul. . .

God bestows three blessings on man: to feed him like birds, dress him like flowers, and befriend him as a confidant. . .

The chief commodity in life is not money; it is fellowship, the act of being known. By this I mean being considered, loved, and appreciated by our peers; to talk and have people listen. A man will give his fortune to gain this one fulfillment. We ache for the being known, the admiration, and the love. This, in itself, is not an evil thing. Without it we would be brutish. Having no need of it, we would not marry, raise children, or stop our cars at crosswalks. And, the ultimate tragedy, having no need of love, we would not love. . .

Too much chicken soup for the soul is not a good thing. Working men eat meat and potatoes. . .

Godliness is not so much a place we are going as it is the going itself. . .

Life is, without a doubt, complex and confusing. My faith is my sanity. There are people who choose to live on the surface of things. I have yet to find the surface. And, with all the beauty in the underneath, I am not certain I want to live on the surface should I find it. I stopped looking a long time ago. . .

God has me on this journey. I am sure of that. I can look back on my life and see God placing me with certain people or in a certain setting or wrestling with a certain scripture; all to bring about the experience of change. The more I ponder God’s way, the more I believe he changes a person, or molds a person, through enlightenment. He changes a person’s mind. When people walked with Christ, I mean actually walked with Christ the way it is presented in the Gospels, He changed their minds. . .

-Donald Miller, Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance

“In so many ways, these places-- support groups, twelve-step recovery groups, demolition derbies-- they’ve come to serve the role that organized religion used to. We used to go to church to reveal the worst aspect of ourselves, our sins. To tell our stories. To be recognized. To be forgiven. And to be redeemed, accepted back into our community. This ritual was our way to stay connected to people, and to resolve our anxiety before it could take us so far from humanity that we would be lost.

In these places I found the truest stories. In support groups. In hospitals. Anywhere people had nothing left to lose, that’s where they told the most truth.”

-Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger than Fiction

"A Christian is a man who lives completely out of himself in Christ -- he lives in the faith of his Redemption, in the love of his Redeemer, loving us for whom He died. He lives, above all, on the hope of a world to come.

Hope is the secret of true asceticism. It denies our own judgments and desires and rejects the world in its present state, not because either we or the world are evil, but because we are not in a condition to make the best use of our own or of the world's goodness. But we rejoice in hope. We enjoy them not as they are in themselves but as they are in Christ -- full of promise. For the goodness of all things is a witness to the goodness of God and His goodness is a guarantee of His fidelity to His promises. He has promised us a new heaven and a new earth, a risen life in Christ. All self-denial that is not entirely suspended from His promise is something less than Christian.

My Lord, I have no hope but in Your Cross. You, by Your humility, and sufferings and death, have delivered me from all vain hope. You have killed the vanity in the present life in Yourself, and have given me all that is eternal in rising from the dead.

Why would I want to be rich, when You were poor? Why should I desire to be famous and powerful in the eyes of men, when the sons of those who exalted the false prophets and stoned the true rejected You and nailed You to the Cross? Why should I cherish in my heart a hope that devours me -- the hope for perfect happiness in this life -- when such hope, doomed to frustration, is nothing but despair?

My hope is in what they eye has never seen. Therefore, let me not trust in visible rewards. My hope is in what the heart of man cannot feel. Therefore let me not trust in the feelings of my heart. My hope is in what the hand of man has never touched. Do not let me trust what I can grasp between my fingers. Death will loosen my grasp and my vain hope will be gone.

Let my trust be in Your mercy, not in myself. Let my hope be in Your love, not in health, or strength, or ability or human resources.

If I trust You, everything else will become, for me, strength, health, and support. Everything will bring me to heaven. If I do not trust you, everything will be my destruction."

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

"A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in the light of a story. A great event has happened; the pilgrim hears the reports and goes in search of the evidence, aspiring to be an eyewitness. The pilgrim seeks not only to confirm the experience of others firsthand but to be changed by the experience.

Pilgrims often make the journey in company, but each must be changed individually; they must see for themselves, each with his or her own eyes. And as they return to ordinary life the pilgrims must tell others what they saw, recasting the story in their own terms."

- Paul Elie, the introduction to The Life You Save May Be Your Own

“My life’s a disaster,” Antoine explained, still standing and nervously twiddling his hands. “But that’s not the worst if it. The real problem is that I’m so aware of it . . .”

-Martin Page, How I Became Stupid