"I will light candles" ~ Howard Thurman

 

Read many great quotes at InwardOutward

"If I were looking for God," by Thomas Merton

If I were looking for God, every event and every moment would sow, in my will, grains of God’s life, that would spring up one day in a tremendous harvest. For it is God’s love that warms me in the sun and God’s love that sends the cold rain. It is God’s love that feeds me in the bread I eat and God that feeds me also by hunger and fasting. It is the love of God that sends the winter days when I am cold and sick, and the hot summer when I labor and my clothes are full of sweat: but it is God who breathes on me with light winds off the river and in the breezes out of the wood.

God’s love spreads the shade by the sycamore over my head and sends the water-boy along the edge of the wheat field with a bucket from the spring, while the laborers are resting and the mules stand under the tree. It is God’s love that speaks to me in the birds and streams but also behind the clamor of the city God speaks to me in God’s judgments, and all these things are seeds sent to me from God’s will. If they would take root in my liberty, and if God’s will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that God is, and my harvest would be God’s glory and my own joy. And I would grow together with thousands and millions of other freedoms into the gold of one huge field praising God, loaded with increase, loaded with corn.

Thomas Merton, Spiritual Illuminations

hat tip - Inward/Outward Blog

Spend time in the wilderness

Whoever joins God’s liberation movement must be content to spend time in the wilderness, to live in tents and not know what the morrow brings.

By Elizabeth O’Connor

from "Inward/Outward" blog

Doing the impossible, quote from Jean Vanier

When Jesus sent his disciples out on mission, he told them to be poor, to take nothing with them. And he told them to do things that were impossible for them to do all by themselves. So it is for all missions. Communities and their members are called to be poor and to do impossible things, such as to build community and to bring healing, reconciliation, forgiveness and wholeness to people. Mission is to bring the life of God to others, and this can only be done if communities and people are poor and humble, letting the life of God flow through them.

Jean Vanier, in Community and Growth

hat tip to Inward/Outward blog

"The other person....becomes an occasion of joy"

It must be a decisive rule of every Christian fellowship that each individual is prohibited from saying much that occurs to him….

Where this discipline of the tongue is practiced right from the beginning, each individual will make a matchless discovery. He will be able to cease from constantly scrutinizing the other person, judging him, condemning him…. Now he can allow the brother to exist as a completely free person, as God made him to be.

Now the other person, in the freedom with which he was created, becomes the occasion of joy, whereas before he was only a nuisance and an affliction. God does not will that I should fashion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather in his very freedom from me, God made this person in His image. I can never know beforehand how God’s image should appear in others.

~~Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together

hat tip to Inward Outward blog

Loving the Liminal from Inward/Outward Blog

Loving the Liminal from "Inward/Outward" Blog:

By Kayla McClurg

The older I get the more I appreciate “liminal” spaces. Impossible to describe with crisp labels, these are the times marked by both grief and joy, despair and celebration. They are times of horrifying loss and isolation as well as tender surprise and intimacy. A tornado sweeps through, drawing a small town close together; a dearly loved one succumbs to addiction and we begin our own journey toward healing; a friend who has loved more freely and fully than any human one has loved before is publicly crucified and now is reported to be alive. It’s all so surreal; it’s all so normal—in liminal space.

Whenever we walk through a passage in-between, we know the liminal....


Read the rest HERE.

Grow into our own authentic selfhood

from the "Inward/Outward" blog, a daily source of wisdom for me.

Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’ Buechner’s definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world: it begins, wisely, where vocation begins—not in what the world needs (which is everything), but in the nature of the human self, in what brings the self joy, the deep joy of knowing that we are here on earth to be the gifts that God created.

By Parker Palmer