'We don't grow and mature in our Christian life by sitting in a classroom and library, listening to lectures and reading books, or going to church and signing hymns and listening to sermons. We do it by taking the stuff or our ordinary lives, our parents and children, our spouses and friends, our workplaces and fellow workers, our dreams and our fantasies, our attachments, our easily accessible gratifications, our depersonalizing of intimate relations, our commodification of living truths into idolatries, taking all this and placing it upon the altar of refining fire - our God is a consuming fire - and finding it all stuff redeemed for a life of holiness. A life that is not reserved for nuns and monks but accessible to every Dick and Jane in every ordinary congregation.'
Eugene H Peterson, The Pastor, p.230.
