SUFFERING

'The extent of our sacrifice coupled with the depth of our joy displays the worth we put on the reward of God. Loss and suffering, joyfully accepted for the kingdom of God, show the supremacy of God's glory more clearly in the world than worhsip and prayer.'

John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad! p.256.

SIN

'...there was a deep, black, wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.'

Flannery O'Connor in Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, p.37.

HELL

'Hell...is the trajetory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.'

Timothy Keller, The Reason for God, p.77.

PLACE

'...a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it - have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.'

Wallace Stegner, 'The Sense of Place' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p.201.

PLACE & IDENTITY

'If you don't where you are, you don't know who you are.'

Wendell Berry in Wallace Stegner, 'This Sense of Place' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p.199.

PEOPLE

'We are creatures shaped by our experiences; we like what we know, more often than we know what we like.'

Wallace Stegner, 'Thoughts in a Dry Land' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p.53.

SUFFERING

'We have to make the preparation now, before we are imprisoned. In prison you lose everything. You are undressed and given a prisoner's suit. No more nice furniture, nice carpets, or nice curtains. You do not have a wife any more and you do not have your children. You do not have your library and you never see a flower. Nothing of what makes life pleasant remains. Nobody resists who has not renounced the pleasures of life beforehand.'

Richard Wurmbrand in John Piper, Let The Nations Be Glad, p.101.

THE CHURCH

'The Holy Spirit...makes the church both an organism and an organization - a cauldron of spontaneously generated spiritual life and ministry, as well as an ordered, structured community with rules and authority. If God only gave gifts to all believers and did not call anyone into a place of authority, the church would only be an organic, spontaneous movement with virtually no institutional structure. If he only gave gifts to "special officers" - ordained ministers - then the church would be exclusively a top-down, command-and-conmtrol institution. But God's Spirit creates both the general and special office - and so we speak of the ardour of the Spirit (creating the movement) and the order of the Spirit (creating the institution). This dynamic balance of the Spirit's work is what makes the church (in human terms) sustainable.'

Timothy Keller, Center Church, p.347.  

AGE

'Age and experience have not made me a Nestor qualified to tell others about how to live their lives. I feel more like more like Theodore Dreiser, who confessed that he would depart from life more bewildered than he had arrived in it. Instead of being embittered, or stoical, or calm, or resigned, or any of the standard things that a long life might have made me, I confess that I am often simply lost, as much in need of comfort, understanding, forgiveness, uncritical love - the things you used to give me - as I ever was at five, or ten.'  

Wallace Stenger, 'Letter, Much Too Late' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, p.22.

WORK

'The question for the church is this: If we believe that Jesus is Lord in every area of life, how do we train our people in the practice of that lordship? In general, this practice has to arise out of intentional learning communities that bring together three different groups of people: (1) older accomplished Christians in a field, (2) younger arriving Christians in a field, and (3) teachers knowledgable in the Bible, theology and church history. These three groups work together to ensure that the right questions are being addressed and to forge answers to those questions that are both biblical and practical.'

Timothy Keller, Center Church, p.333.