We must know before we can love. In order to know God, we must often think of Him; and when we come to love Him, we shall also think of Him often, for our heart will be with our treasure!
-Brother Lawrence
Crutches and Kryptonite
Compassion in Weakness
Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
Henri Nouwen
Longing in Silence
I think God is like a kaleidoscope. God is unchanging, but we’re standing on the image we see. One day we wake up and find that God has shifted the image. Everything looks different. The world looks different. The world seems new. The trick is learning how to recognize that all the old colors are still there. It’s just the patterns that have changed.
Eileen (Tables In the Wilderness by Preston Yancey)
Open Up
We are confronted every day with the sights and sounds of a world in distress- our world. These things should assault our eyes and ears. Instead, they have become familiar backgrounds and ambient noises of our daily lives. They have become so “normal” that we simply no longer hear and no longer see. The result? We no longer pay attention.
-Paul David Tripp
The world we live in is a very interesting place. We encounter people across every part of the spectrum. We “try” to impact those around us. However, in this time, even that rarely happens. We tend to turn a blind eye to what is going on around us.