Quote of the Week

"Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing

and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies."

- Flannery O’Conner

Quote of the Week

“All you phonies got it wrong
Double lives take half as long”

- Steve Taylor

Quote of the Week

“Kings demand obedience, usually based on the consequences of disobedience. Jesus, in contrast, demands submission. There is a difference. Obedience is when we act the way someone wants us to or forces us to. Submission goes beyond just actions. It’s more a matter of attitude—a genuine desire to submit ourselves to someone. We can obey on the outside but still not submit on the inside. We can obey through our actions but not submit in our hearts. Jesus as king deserves submission, not just obedience.”

- Robert Zwier, Roberts Wesleyan College Convocation, 9/7/07

"Their Passions a Quotation"

Last night I attended a bi-monthly student-led worship service called "Focus" here at Lincoln Christian College & Seminary. The speaker shared one thought that kind of stuck with me. He quoted Oscar Wilde as saying:

"Most people are other people.

Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

You can almost hear the disdain in Wilde's voice, saying that "most people" are unoriginal and incomplete. But last night's speaker made an interesting point . . . as Christians, it should be a compliment for someone to say that our lives are a mimicry and our passions a quotation, so long as they have seen that the one we are mimicking is Jesus Christ.

Quote of the Week

“Christians shouldn’t just be known for being ‘pro-life’ . . . . Instead, we need to embrace a more holistic definition of Christ’s love and example. We need to be ‘whole-life.’ Whole-life means living out Jesus’ example in our world today—fighting injustice, promoting life, being good stewards of our natural and financial resources, and showing God’s love in a tangible way.”

- Cameron Strang, “What it means to be whole-life,” Relevant, Nov/Dec 2008, p. 8

Quote of the Week

“Sadly, it only took five days for Palm Sunday hosannas to become Good Friday hisses. It only took five days for ‘Hail him!’ to become ‘Crucify him!’ It's interesting to look at what was going on with Jesus during those five days. On a walk from Bethany to Jerusalem, he got hungry. He spotted a fig tree, and that probably made him hungrier. But there was a problem. It wasn't fig season. That shouldn't be a problem for someone who can turn tap water into fine wine. Still, when Jesus found the tree fruitless, he cursed it rather than ‘fixed’ it. The next day the tree was shriveled and dead. We could chalk that up to Jesus being in a bad mood. Who could blame him? He knew what was coming. But maybe he was sending us a message. Maybe he was telling us and his disciples that every season is fruit season.”

- Bill Robinson, President of Whitworth University (April 2009)

Quote of the Week

“Compassion is when we’re all sitting on the side of a river watching people drown and respond by pulling people out. But justice is when somebody pokes their head up and says, ‘You know what? I’m going to go upstream and see who keeps throwing everybody into the river.’”

- Unknown

Quote of the Week

Shades of grey wherever I go
The more I find out the less that I know
Black and white is how it should be
But shades of grey are the colors I see

- Billy Joel, from Shades of Grey

Quote of the Week

“Doing business without advertising is like winking at someone in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”

- Stuart Henderson Britt

Quote of the Week

“Worry is a special form of fear. The traditional distinction is that fear is caused by an external source while worry or anxiety is produced from the inside. Yet they produce the same physical responses. Worry is fear that has unpacked its bags and signed a long-term lease. Worry never moves out of its own accord—it has to be evicted.”

- John Ortberg
If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat
p. 123

Quote of the Week

“Nuclear weapons are so 20^th century.”

- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
President of Iran

Quote of the Week

“The old paradigm of evangelism was a transactional sharing of the gospel. I would try to get people to intellectually agree with me. But the new paradigm is different, an approach in which I invite you to walk alongside me, examine my life, and see evidence of the truth, and hopefully there will be something compelling that you see. It’s a no-strings-attached invitation to enter my life as I follow Jesus.”

- Ken Fong, senior pastor, Evergreen Baptist Church, Los Angeles CA

Quote of the Week

“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”

- Henry David Thoreau
in Life Without Principle

Quote of the Week

“The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is fear.”

- Eugene Habecker, President, Taylor University (Upland IN)
April 11, 2008

Quote of the Week

“A guess is just a guess until you turn it into a pie chart.
Then it’s an analysis.”

- Scott Adams
Dilbert’s Guide to the Rest of Your Life

Quote of the Week

“By defining Americanism too narrowly and backwardly, conservative patriotism risks becoming clubby. And by celebrating America too unabashedly—without sufficient regard for America’s sins—it risks degenerating from patriotism into nationalism, a self-righteous, chest-thumping ideology that celebrates America at the expense of the rest of the world. But if conservative patriotism can be too exclusionary, liberal patriotism risks not being exclusionary enough. If liberals love America purely because it embodies ideals like liberty, justice and equality, why shouldn’t they love Canada—which from a liberal perspective often goes further toward realizing those principles—even more? And what do liberals do when those universal ideals collide with America’s self interest? Giving away the federal budget to Africa would probably increase the sum of justice and equality on the planet after all. But it would harm Americans and thus be unpatriotic.”

- Peter Beinart, “Patriot Games” in Time, 7-7-08, p. 32

Quote of the Week

“The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money... This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all those years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did. I became convicted about these things, so much so that I had some trouble getting to sleep. It was clear that I was to love everybody, be delighted at everybody's existence, and I had fallen miles short of God's aim... I repented. I told God I was sorry. I replaced economic metaphor, in my mind, with something different, a free gift metaphor or a magnet metaphor. That is, instead of withholding love to change somebody, I poured it on, lavishly. I hoped that love would work like a magnet, pulling people from the mire and toward healing. I knew this was the way God loved me. God had never withheld love to teach me a lesson..."

- Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

(Sorry for the lack of posts lately . . . simply an indicator of how nuts life is right now for me. Feel free to keep me in your prayers.)

Quote of the Week

“Know what I figured out? The meaning of words isn’t a fixed thing? Any word can mean anything! By giving words new meanings, ordinary English can become an exclusionary code! Two generations can be divided by the same language! To that end, I’ll be inventing new definitions for common words, so we’ll be unable to communicate. Don’t you think that’s totally spam? It’s lubricated! Well, I’m phasing.”

- Calvin, of “Calvin and Hobbes” in The Days are Just Packed

Quote of the Week

“. . . If you want to learn something that will really help you, learn to see yourself as God sees you and not as you see yourself in the distorted mirror of your own self-importance. This is the greatest and most useful lesson we can learn: to know ourselves for what we truly are, to admit freely our weaknesses and failings, and to hold a humble opinion of ourselves because of them. Not to dwell on ourselves and always to think well and highly of others is great wisdom and perfection . . . .”

- Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Quote of the Week

“Despair is suffering without meaning.”

Viktor Frankl, Nazi concentration camp survivor
Quoted in
Soul Survivor, by Philip Yancey, p. 215