THE PERMANENCE OF GOD'S LOVE

'Everything in this life is going to be taken away from us, except one thing: God's love which can go into death with us and take us through it and into His hands.'

Timothy Keller, On Death, p.26. 

PRAYER IS ENGAGING GOD

'Some of us are taught to think that reading the Bible means sitting in God's classroom and that prayer is politely raising our hand when we have a question about what he is teaching us in his Deuteronomy lecture. The Psalms, our prayer text within the biblical text, show us something quite different: prayer is engaging God, an engaging that is seldom accomplished by a murmured greeting and a conventional handshake. The engagement, at least in its initial stages, is more like a quarrel that a greeting, more like a wrestling match than a warm embrace.'

Eugene H Peterson, Eat this Book, p.104.

THE WHOLE BIBLE CONTEXT TO EVERY BIBLE VERSE

'It takes the whole Bible to read any part of the Bible.'
Eugene H Peterson, Eat this Book, p.48.

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE IS A STORY

'The Christian life is conducted in story conditions. The Bible is basically and overall a narrative - an immense, sprawling, capacious narrative.'

Eugene H Peterson, Eat this Book, p.40.

GOOD LANGUAGE CREATES

'It is the very nature of language to form rather than inform. When language is personal, which it is at its best, it reveals; and revelation is always formative - we don't know more, we become more. Our best users of language, poets and lovers and children and saints, use words to make - make intimacies, make character, make beauty, make goodness, make truth.'

Eugene H Peterson, Eat this Book: a conversation in the art of spiritual reading, p.24.

DISCOVERING WHO YOU ARE

'...Elwood was changed. Closer. At the demonstration, he had felt somehow closer to himself.'
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, p.35.

THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGE

'...maybe you cannot ever really walk away from the things you most want to walk away from.'

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men, p.66.

HOW EACH STAGE MAKES THE WHOLE

'I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child I am always a child. Because I was one a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be. Because I was once a rebellious student, there is and always will be in me the student crying out for reform.

This does to mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any these ages, the perpetual student, the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide: my past is part of what makes the present Madeleine and must not be denied or rejected or forgotten.'

Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p.200.

GOD FEELS

'One hot afternoon the fire siren rang and Quinn went with the firemen to the top of a steep hill where a car was burning; the flames were completely out of control, and inside the inferno was an entire family, a mother, father, and four children.

At his seminary, Quinn had been taught that God, being perfect, is impassible and cannot suffer. That evening he stormed, "If God didn't care, then I don't want him,"

I cried out, "Of course he cared! He was there in that burning car. If he wasn't, then he isn't God."

General compassion is useless. An aloof, general god is useless. Unless we, too, are in that burning car, we are useless.

It is still taught in some seminaries that it is a heresy to think that God can suffer with us. But what does the incarnation show us but the ultimate act of particularity? This is what compassion is all about.'

Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p.193.

SEX NEEDS UNIQUENESS

'What concerns me most in the present prevalent freedom - no, not freedom, license, which is a very different thing - about the act of sex, is blunting the particular. If bedding becomes a series of one night stands, it becomes a general thing-in-itself, instead of a very particular act between two particular, unique, irreproducible, irreplaceable persons. When it becomes a thing-in-itself, it is reduced to the de-personalising realm of the general..'

Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p.169.