Calling

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

With the drawing of this Love, and the Voice of this Calling, we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Here lies the tremendous mystery—that God should be all-powerful, yet refuse to coerce. He summons us to cooperation. We are honored in being given the opportunity to participate in his good deeds. Remember how He asked for help in performing his miracles: Fill the water pots, stretch out your hand, distribute the loaves.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.

All glory comes from daring to begin.

Look, I'm just a singer. But in the end, I want to tear a little corner off the darkness.

One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.

We're not free until we're bound to be free, until there's something that has a claim upon us other than our self, our aspirations, our psychological and intellectual and sexual tics and yearnings and desires for community.

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business , and turns into a racquet.

The road goes ever on and on; down from the door where it began.

In 1836, Charles Simeon retired after fifty-four years of ministry at the Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, UK. There he had been engaged in a ministry of expository preaching that had sent several generations of young Christian leaders out into British society. He had accomplished far more than 99.99% of ministers ever do. Yet a friend discovered that this elderly man was still rising at 4:00 a.m. every morning to light his own fire and to spend time reading the Bible, praying, repenting, and spending time with God. His friend thought this was over-kill. “Mr. Simeon,” he pleaded, “Do you not think that, now that you are retired, you might take things more easily?” “What?!” replied the old Charles Simeon, “Shall I not now run with all my might when the winning-post is in sight?”.

How does a kid from Coos Bay, with one leg longer than the other win races? All my life people have been telling me, 'You're too small Pre', 'You're not fast enough Pre', 'Give up your foolish dream Steve'. But they forgot something, I HAVE TO WIN.

A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to see and do new things.

I don’t want people who want to dance. I want people who have to dance

And the world being after all full of strange creatures beyond count, these little people seemed of very little importance. But in the days of Bilbo, and of Frodo his heir, they suddenly became, by no wish of their own, both important and renowned, and troubled the counsels of the Wise and the Great.

Why was I chosen?’ ‘Such questions cannot be answered,’ said Gandalf. ‘You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom, at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.’

‘And now,’ said the wizard, turning back to Frodo, ‘the decision lies with you. But I will always help you.’ He laid his hand on Frodo’s shoulder. ‘I will help you bear this burden, as long as it is yours to bear. But we must do something, soon. The Enemy is moving.’

‘Neither brave nor silly, I think. I could hardly help myself. I seemed to be drawn somehow.

Rivendell.’ ‘Have you often been to Rivendell?’ said Frodo. ‘I have,’ said Strider. ‘I dwelt there once, and still I return when I may. There my heart is; but it is not my fate to sit in peace, even in the fair house of Elrond.’

Frodo. ‘Yes, I, Gandalf the Grey,’ said the wizard solemnly. ‘There are many powers in the world, for good or for evil. Some are greater than I am. Against some I have not yet been measured. But my time is coming.

If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. That has been the task of my kindred, while the years have lengthened and the grass has grown.

‘The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.’ ‘Very well, very well, Master Elrond!’

‘I will take the Ring,’ he said, ‘though I do not know the way.’

‘If I understand aright all that I have heard,’ he said, ‘I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will.

‘In the deep places of the world! And thither we are going against my wish. Who will lead us now in this deadly dark?’ ‘I will,’ said Gandalf, ‘and Gimli shall walk with me. Follow my staff

‘But when the great fall, the less must lead.

‘I don’t like anything here at all,’ said Frodo, ‘step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.’

The Bible presents sin by way of major concepts, principally lawlessness and faithlessness, expressed in an array of images: sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. Sin is blindness and deafness. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it —both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance: even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways. Sinful life, as Geoffrey Bromiley observes, is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life. CHAPTER 1 - Vandalism of Shalom

Spiritual hygiene includes ends like these —goals, purposes, primary intended consequences. The point of our lives is not to get smart or to get rich or even to get happy. The point is to discover God’s purposes for us and to make them our own. The point is to learn ways of loving God above all and our neighbor as ourselves and then to use these loves the way a golfer uses certain checkpoints to set up for a drive. The point is to be lined up right, to seek first the kingdom of God (Matt. 6: 33), to try above all to increase the net amount of shalom in the world.

The point is to be lined up right, to seek first the kingdom of God (Matt. 6: 33), to try above all to increase the net amount of shalom in the world. CHAPTER 3 - Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration

Ultimately, the only human beings we know are people who have been created to please God and build shalom but who, to a greater or lesser degree, mysteriously live against the purpose of their existence.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

Man is a mystery. If you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

The word ‘busy’ is the symptom not of commitment but of betrayal. It is not devotion but defection.

The puzzle is why so many people live so badly. Not so wickedly, but so inanely. Not so cruelly, but so stupidly. There is little to admire and less to imitate in the people who are prominent in our culture. We have celebrities but not saints.

Much good work has been hindered by such an anxiety to do better as deters one from promptly doing one's best.