Traveling Light Relay

Sin, both our own and that of others, drives us into customized selfishness. Separation from God becomes separation from neighbor. The same salvation that restores our relation with God reinstates us in the community of persons who live by faith. Every tendency to privatism and individualism distorts and falsifies the gospel. The Bible knows nothing of the soul who is, in Plotinus’s words, “alone with the Alone.”
— Eugene H. Peterson
Reversed Thunder

Typically an American today would say “I want to be spiritual but I don’t want to be religious” and what they mean by that is that “I want to have a personal experience of divine reality but I don’t want to have to deal with other people, I don’t want to have to join an institution, I don’t want to be part of a body.” And the God of the Bible says, “I don’t work like that, if you want something like that you are going to have to make up another God. The only way you can hold on to Me is if you hold on to brothers and sisters… people who you would not have chosen to be friends with in the first place. Because they are related to Me you have to be related to them and you must hold on to them and love them and know them.”
— Tim Keller

Repentance is not a popular word these days, but I believe that any of us recognize it when it strikes us in the gut. Repentance is coming to our senses, seeing, suddenly, what we’ve done that we might not have done, or recognizing…that the problem is not in what we do but in what we become.
— Kathleen Norris
The Cloister Walk

In the person of Christ do meet together infinite majesty and infinite meekness. These are two qualifications that meet together in no other person but Christ. It is he that is terrible out of his holy place; who is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea: before whom a fire goeth; at whose presence the earth quakes, and the hills melt; whose eyes are as a flame of fire, and of whose dominion there is no end. And yet he was the most marvelous instance of meekness, and humble quietness of spirit that ever was; when he was reviled, he reviled not again; he had a wonderful spirit of forgiveness, was ready to forgive his worst enemies, and prayed from them with fervent effectual prayers. Thus is Christ a lion in majesty, and a lamb in meekness.
— Jonathan Edwards

Not long ago, I was asked by a college student how I could stand to go to church, how I could stand the hypocrisy of Christians. I had one of my rare inspirations, when I know the right thing to say, and I replied, “The only hypocrite I have to worry about on Sunday morning is myself.”
— Kathleen Norris The Cloister Walk

Love cannot exist in isolation: away from others, love bloats into pride. Grace cannot be received privately: cut off from others, it is perverted into greed. Hope cannot develop in solitude: separated from the community, it goes to seed in the form of fantasies. No gift, no virtue can develop and remain healthy apart from the community of faith. “Outside the church there is no salvation is not ecclesiastical arrogance but spiritual common sense, confirmed in everyday experience.
— Eugene Peterson Reversed Thunder