God In The Ordinary

God is He Who Is and his world is the world that is. What are extraordinary are the ordinary, concrete realities of daily life. And it is our desire to be extraordinary that, in fact, makes us less than ordinary whenever such desires move us to pull away from, reject or even just ignore God manifesting himself to us in the next hot August afternoon or the cold wind of a winter evening.

Why Keep Doing It?

All I know is that Jesus proclaimed the kingdom in a time of history when his people were occupied, discouraged and enslaved, when religion was often corrupt, and the numbers who understood were few. Yet he said, the Kingdom of God is in your midst! What is the alternative? Does anyone else have a greater wisdom or a greater vision? To whom else shall we go?

New Site Layout

If you frequent this site you probably quickly realized that there have been some changes. First off, I purchased the basic subscription so that the ads don’t appear. I have no control over the ads so that presents the possibility inconsistency with the content I am posting here.

The theme I had been using is no longer supported by WordPress, and therefore I felt it prudent to switch to a theme that is supported. I chose a simple theme, one that focuses on the words. The picture in the head graphic is my own, taken of Lake Michigan during the summer of 2016.

I originally created this site to be a place for me to share notes I created in preparation for leading a book group, which I am no longer leading. Now I use this site to share quotes from the books that I am reading.

Unfortunately, the iOS version of the Amazon Kindle app does not share the text of quotes like it does in the Android version, instead it wants to just share a link. The consequence is that there isn’t a link that provides proper attribution. My work around is to use tags.

Each quote I share has a tag to the author of the quote, and usually I also include a tag to the title of the book the quote is from. The tags appear on the page that displays when you click the title of the quote. If you want to see all the quotes on the site for a particular person, you can click the associated entry in the tag cloud on the right side of the site’s main page.

Grace

When grace is a punishment for you, you are in Hell. When grace and punishment are fighting within you, you are in Purgatory. When grace is received without payment or punishment, you are in Heaven.

What Is Faith?

Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don’t have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You’re trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Repentance

We are finding that the system, without a gospel of healing repentance, is actually more unforgiving than the Church ever was. All it has is the law, which kills, but Jesus has offered us the Spirit, which gives life (see 2 Corinthians 3: 6).

On Faith

Forget for the moment about believing in the Immaculate Conception or the pope. Those are fine, but they’re not what Jesus is talking about. He’s talking about the grace and the freedom to live God’s dream for the world now—while not rejecting the world as it is.

Need To Let Go

Unless you’re willing to let go of your self-created ego worlds, you will not see the Kingdom in your midst. The ego, by nature, is conservative. It strives to conserve, to maintain itself. That translates into seeking a comfort zone to live within and staying there. Once we find that place where we feel secure, we may do anything to maintain it!