discipleship

Our awareness of God starts where self-sufficiency ends.

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

Treat this crisis as practice for the next crisis.

What God did for Jesus in standing up for Him, standing behind Him in life and in death, and in standing in communion and solidarity with Him, the Father also does for us, here and now, in our lives.

Conversion, constant conversion, is the message of the Gospel.

If the Gospel of Jesus is relational, that is, if our brokenness will be fixed not by our understanding of theology but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only Heaven knows.

Your job is to abide in my pastureEating sweet grass and drinking pure water,And sharing both with others__hat is a lamb__ business.

Mine is to chew on the appropriate texts and make them delectable.

After death something new begins, over which all powers of the world of death have no more might.

A colleague like Barnabas could comfort him (Paul) in illness and keep him from overstrain when fit.

Edmondson has incisively discussed the ways college campuses have grown akin to upscale retirement homes for the very young, where the promise of intellectually demanding courses ranks far below the lure of new gymnastic facilities.

Ehimlite universities are strong at delivering their commercial mission. They are pretty strong in developing their cognitive mission. But when it comes to the sort of growth Deresiewicz is talking about, everyone is on their own. An admissions officer might bias her criteria slightly away from the Résumé God and toward the quirky kid. A student may privately wrestle with taking a summer camp job instead of an emotionally vacuous but résumé-padding internship. But these struggles are informal, isolated and semi-articulate.

If I am to have faith when I pray, I must find some promise in the Word of God to rest my faith on

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

Some Christians believe the harder that one thinks, the colder faith will grow. Augustine grew more brilliant as he grew more pious, more creative as he became more orthodox. His period of heresy was imitative, but his traditional Christianity took mental risks.

You get a feeling when you look back on life that all God really wants from us is to live inside a body He made, and enjoy the story, and to bond with Him through the experience.

There's a difference, you know, between faith and playing make-believe. One will make you grow. The other one will make you sleep.

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.