an outlet of encouragement, explanation, and exhortation

Category: Quotes (Page 6 of 10)

Dallas Willard, on his impending death

Gary Moon wrote in his recent biography of Dallas Willard, Becoming Dallas Willard, about J.P. Moreland’s visit after it became clear Willard would not live for much longer. “Are you afraid of dying?”

Willard smiled as he responded, “No, J. P., I actually believe the things I’ve been teaching all these years.”

Moon reports that Dallas Willard spoke about joy for his own funeral: “It’s really important to understand how joy cuts through everything. It cuts through everything. And to anticipate that your moment of passage from this earth will be one of great joy.”

Isaac Newton’s Great Ocean of Truth

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isacc Newton

Notes from the Other Side – Jane Kenyon

I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.

Now there is no more catching
one’s own eye in the mirror,

there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of course

no illness. Contrition
does not exist, nor gnashing

of teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.

The poor we no longer have with us.
Our calm hearts strike only the hour,

and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothed in light.

Jane Kenyon
Notes from the Other Side

Growth and Asking Questions

I heard Jeffrey Greenman, President of Regent College say, in a talk on ethics:

You grow in the direction of what you ask questions about.

My corollary: It’s when I think I’ve got it figured out that I stop asking questions. Life is a good corrective to such an attitude. God isn’t complacent about our complacency.

Staying at the Bottom and the Edges

[Jesus] demands of his first followers a living witness to a simple life on the edge, because once you are at the visible center, once you are on the top, you have too much to prove and too much to protect… The only free positions in this world are at the bottom and at the edges of things. Everywhere else, there is too much to maintain – an image to promote and a fear of losing it all – which ends up controlling your whole life.

– Richard Rohr, in Dancing Standing Still; Healing the World from a Place of Prayer

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