A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is in the shelter of each other that people live.
- Irish proverb
Stay where you are. Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering and the lonely right there where you are — in your own homes and in your own families, in your workplaces and in your schools. … You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have the eyes to see. Everywhere, wherever you go, you find people who are unwanted, unloved, uncared for, just rejected by society — completely forgotten, completely left alone.
~ Mother Teresa
To be rooted is perhaps the most important need of the human soul.
– Simone Weil
I’ve realized again and again that my pain was a gift from God. As I’ve met people around the world and shared my pain with them, it is the pain that draws people in, far more so than my limited talents, skills, and accomplishments. It disarms all the things that can be used to divide us – race, economics, culture, politics, nationalism, dogma, language.
- Dave Gibbons, The Monkey and the Fish
To move outwards is to move towards God. God is always with the outsiders – the least.
- Brian Mavis
Repentance is the doorway to the spiritual life, the only way to begin. It is also the path itself, the only way to continue. Anything else is foolishness and self-delusion. Only repentance is both brute-honest enough, and joyous enough, to bring us all the way home.
- Frederica Mathewes-Green, from her essay, “Both Door and Path”
A number of years ago a wise man pointed out to me the root difference between the ethic of Jesus and the ethic of the Pharisees. Usually we think of the difference in these terms: the Pharisees had an ethic of externals, of ritual and rigmarole, and Jesus had an ethic of the heart, of the heart’s inner workings. The Pharisees were concerned about not committing adultery, while Jesus was concerned about about lust, the root of adultery. He was concerned with adulterousness.
That’s true as far as it goes, only it doesn’t go very far. The deeper difference between Jesus’ ethic and that of the Pharisees was this: The Pharisees had an ethic of avoidance, and Jesus had an ethic of involvement. The Pharisee’s question was not “How can I glorify God?” It was “How can I avoid bringing disgrace to God?” This degenerated into a concern not with God, but with self – with image, reputation, procedure. They didn’t ask, “How can I make others clean?” They asked, “How can I keep myself from getting dirty?” They did not seek to rescue sinners, only to avoid sinning.
Jesus in sharp contrast, got involved. He sought always and in all ways to help, to heal, to save, to restore. Rather than running from evil, He ran to toward good….Jesus got close enough to unholy people for the spark of holiness in Him to jump. He took the tax collectors, the rough fisherman, the harlots, the demon possessed, and gave back to them dignity and life…. The Pharisees avoided these people lest they were infected with their sin and overwhelmed by their evil.
The tragedy is that we have often preferred the ethic of the Pharisees to the ethic of Christ.
- Mark Buchanan, Your God Is Too Safe p 108-09
This life, therefore, is not godliness but the process of becoming godly, not health but getting well, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way. The process is not yet finished, but it is actively going on. This is not the goal but it is the right road. At present, everything does not gleam and sparkle, but everything is being cleansed.
- Martin Luther
The people of God are not merely to mark time, waiting for God
to step in and set right all that is wrong. Rather, they are to
model the new heaven and new earth, and by so doing awaken
longings for what God will someday bring to pass.
— Philip Yancey
