Incomplete love
Here are 10 of my favorite quotes that I love reading regularly.
“And if you live for yourself, remember, the bigger you get in your eyes, the smaller you get in your eyes.” - Tim Keller
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“If you suddenly or unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give into it. Whatever it is don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.” - Mary Oliver
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“Let them experience/do hard things to see how capable they are at an early age. Society will teach them to avoid all bad feelings… but teach your girl that she can handle the good and the bad. A mean comment, a hard truth, a sad season… they were meant to weather the storm. My dad told me in junior high that there would always be someone prettier and more talented than me, and he was right. It made me realize I was not in a competition with others. My job is to do the best with the lot he gave me. I expected life to be hard and wasn’t surprised by its challenges. In the back of my mind, I knew that the good was a fleeting gift and the bad a temporary challenge. I was exposed to a lot of difficult realities of life really early… poverty, starvation, war, etc. and I’m so grateful I had parents who helped me see above and beyond the daily discomforts/inconveniences of life. If your daughter is caught up in silly things… get her out of that silly environment. Travel, talk about things that matter, open her eyes to a world far beyond which boy likes her in school and what she wears. Make her world bigger.” - Sam Ponder
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“So instead we respond to evil force with the violence of grace. Think Les Mis! ‘When Jean Valjean left the bishop’s home, he felt he knew the pardon of this priest was the hardest assault and the most formidable attack which he had ever sustained on his heart. (Grace does violence. Grace is traumatic. Grace destroys enmity.) He knew therefore he must conquer or be conquered. There was no longer a middle course for him now. He would either have to mount higher than the bishop or fall lower than a galley slave. If he became good, he knew he would become an angel. And if he would remain wicked, he knew he would become a monster. He wept long and bitterly. But while he wept, a light grew brighter in his mind, a light at once transporting and terrible it seemed to him horrible and frightful, and then he realized it was a soft light upon that life and upon that soul, and he realized he was looking upon Satan by the light of paradise.’ That’s the Gospel. There’s nothing more formidable and violent in the best possible way than grace. That’s what Jesus did on the cross. Grace is astounding because it is so meritless, so free.” - Keller
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“I thought I had to travel the world to find meaning. Voyage into the noise— like most do. But I do believe I’ve already found deep meaning, in quite the opposite. Silence. The light shining through the kitchen window had so much to tell me, all I had to do was listen.” - Sadahire
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“French philosopher Simone Weil, a Jewish woman that came to Christian faith, says the love we feel for the splendor of the heavens, the plains, the sea and the mountains, for the breath of the wind or the warmth of the sun, this love of which every human being has at least an inkling, is an incomplete painful love. Because the beauty of the world makes us yearn for some universal beauty behind it that does not seem to respond to us. The world is singing to us about something that we can’t enter. Now what would that be?“ - Keller
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“What is meant to happen is when I am done with a meal, I am filled with a sense of presence and love of God… not just saying this is the best restaurant ever and I want this restaurant in my life. And so, you have to train yourself to experience the greater blessing behind the blessing. The fact you can peel a tangerine and it’s sweet and juicy, is there because God loves you and He’s present. That’s his little message: I’m in your life and I love you and I want you to experience good things. It’s like driving your family to the beach for a wonderful family vacation, an awesome wonderful time, and you stop at the first sign for the beach and have your vacation there. You’re not fully experiencing the blessings in your life if you aren’t praising God for them.” - Paul David Tripp
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“‘Other-orientation’ is at the heart of the universe. Jesus says, ‘So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.’ (John 17:5) Greek theologians call this perichoresis (where we get the English word choreography) of love. Each person in the Trinity centers (think dances!) on the other two with delight, love, glory, and honor. The very heart of God is self-giving love. So self-giving love is what we are made for since we are made in His image.” - Keller
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“Every human being has a deep spiritual longing but in our natural state, those deep spiritual longings are distorted by fear. Every human being is deeply religious, but the religion that we've all got is a religion of fear. Paul says that every human being is homo religioso, is inherently religious. The deepest need that any human being has got is to worship. We all have got to have some overarching religious goal or purpose that gives everything else meaning. We are not like animals. We cannot get up every day and simply do what's there. We have to worship. Every human being is deeply religious, regardless of what you think, regardless of what you claim. Know yourselves here. Everyone must worship. Nature will be served, and we'll worship something even if it's bad. Unless the Holy Spirit has come in and renewed our heart, unless we've actually found the true God through faith in Christ, all of our religions are essentially religions of fear. They do not know their Father will either give them what they ask or he will give them something better. They don't believe that they've got a Father up there that will listen to their prayer. And the reason for that is simply this: The natural bent of the human heart is to know there is a God, but to not trust him further than you can throw him. And you know what? You can't throw God very far. How heavy is omnipotence?” - Keller
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“Whatever happened to him in that moment was the end of the world as Paul had known it— it was the loss of all things. Amid that loss, Paul came to know Christ. The narrative arc of his life had been crucified. In that eulogy moment, Paul actually discovered what it meant to be in Christ, to know Christ. And that became all that mattered for him. For Paul, to be in Christ means to be in Christ’s story: losing all things and finding everything in the process. We spend the vast majority of our lives building and accumulating. When we face the loss of all things and everything comes crashing down, that’s the moment that Christ shows up. That’s the moment we come to know Christ. Theologian Andrew Root says, ‘To be in Christ is to encounter the opposite in collision. It’s to find the divine in the human; life in suffering; strength in weakness. To be in Christ is to find him ministering to you in and through your experiences of denial. Faith is the way into this realm because only the faith of Jesus himself can find coherence in the experience of these opposites. Only with that faith can there be new reality from where death comes life.’ Beloved, that is indeed the call of faith. We may have spent a lifetime of learning about Christ, but when the resume values fail us and we face the loss of all things, that’s when we come to know Christ, which is very different than knowing about Christ. Thus, Paul writes he ‘wants to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead’ (Philippians 3:10-11). By the grace of God working through the faith of Christ, may it be so. Amen.” - Joe Clifford