This Sunday’s readings: Psalm 3

Reflections

Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.
~ Bruce Lee (1940-1973), actor, director and martial artist

Know, at the end of the day, following Jesus is not necessarily designed to be safe. Safety is a natural desire but it can keep us from being like Jesus in the midst of an unsafe world.
~ The Art of Neighboring by Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon

Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
~ C.S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters

It seems that genuine Christianity can survive anything but comfort, privilege and ease.
~ Anonymous, 33 AD

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.
~ Epictetus, 135 AD, Stoic Philosopher

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self…. And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one’s self.
~ Søren Kierkegaard

“The essence of sin is disordered love.” Disordered loves means that we often love the less-important things more, and the more-important things less than we ought to, and this wrong prioritization leads to unhappiness and disorder in our lives. … “The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.”
~ Nick Cady, American Pastor, on Augustine’s disordered loves

This Sunday’s readings: Psalm 1

Reflections

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
~ Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy

The Law is like mountain water, like fresh air after a dungeon, like sanity after a nightmare. In so far as this idea of the Law’s beauty, sweetness, or preciousness, arose from the contrast of the surrounding Paganisms, we now find occasion to recover it.
~ CS Lewis, Professor, Author

Mental health requires that the human will submit itself to something higher than itself. To function decently in this world we must submit ourselves to some principle that takes precedence over what we want at any given moment.
~M. Scott Peck (1936-2005), American Psychiatrist/Author

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.
~ Boris Pasternak, 1890-1960, Russian Poet/Novelist

We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value. The idols of today are unmistakable – self-esteem without achievement, sex without consequences, wealth without responsibility, pleasure without struggle and experience without commitment.
~ Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020), British Orthodox Rabbi

There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things.
~ Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955, Poet, Executive