Quotes

Marriage is a crisis

March 11, 2020 0 Comments

Mike Mason has written one of the most powerful and reflective books on marriage: The Mystery of Marriage — As Iron Sharpens Iron. I love his way with language. He plunges into the depths seeking to give words to what happens when a man and a women marry. He writes that marriage is a crisis.

Is it any wonder if some people will do everything in their power to keep love away from them? For we know instinctively that love is like some violent revolutionary, head stuffed with wild dreams instead of brains, a dangerous idealist who would like nothing better than to grab hold of us and shake us right down to our boots, overthrowing all our old ideas and ambition, drastically renovating our hearts from the ground up, filling us with entirely new motives for living. To give into such a force, for one moment, is to be quite, quite swept away. Give love an inch and it will take our whole lives, and it will all happen like lightning, in the twinkling of an eye.

This is what makes marriage such a thrilling enterprise: that it has the power, much more than other more obviously disruptive forces, to change the entire course of a life. Some people go into marriage thinking that they will not have to change much, or perhaps only a little bit along lines that are perfectly foreseeable and within their control. Such people are in for a rough ride. When the terrifying and inexorable process of change sets in, they dig in their heels and refuse to budge, and the ensuing tug-of-war wreaks havoc in every department of their previously comfortable existence.

Marriage, even under the best of circumstances is a crisis–one of the major crisis of life–and it is a dangerous thing not be aware of this. Whether it turns out to be a healthy, challenging, and constructive crisis or a disastrous nightmare depends largely upon how willing the partners are to be changed, how malleable they are. Yet ironically, it is some of the most hardened and crusty and unlikely people in the world who plunge themselves into the arms of marriage and thereby submit in almost total naïveté to the two most transforming powers known to the human heart: the love of another person and the gracious love of God. So be prepared for change! Be prepared for the most sweeping and revolutionary reforms of a lifetime.

Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage, p. 60-62.

Quotes, Relationships

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Love the Whole Creation

November 26, 2019 0 Comments

Moltman, in his book The Living God and the Fullness of Life, reminded me of a beautiful call in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamasov. I’ll include a brief portion of Moltmann’s set up and then the Dostoevsky quote:

Participation in the life of the earth leads to a feeling for the universal life. This new earthly spirituality awakes cosmic humility, which takes the place of the modern arrogance of power, and which is reflected in the dominance over nature. Every serious scientist knowns this cosmic humility in astonishment over the unexplored mysteries of nature (as long as he or she does not intend to “market” his or her discoveries). Another characteristic is cosmic love, which the Starez Sosima expresses in Doestoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamasov,

Love the whole creation, all of it and every grain of sand. Love every little leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love every single thing. If you love very single thing, then God’s mystery in them will be revealed to you. Once it is revealed to you, then you will perceive it more and more every day. And in the end you will love the whole universe with an all-comprehensive love.

Jurgen Moltmann, The Living God and the Fullness of Life, 2015, p. 84-85.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov I, book 6.

Note: Moltmann is also noting Richard Bauckham’s work Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation and his concept of “cosmic humility.”

Change, Creation, Quotes

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The Danger of Despair or What We May Feel After We Give

June 22, 2018 0 Comments

22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 24Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Galatians 5:22-25 (NIV)

 

Have you ever felt as if your giving was accomplishing nothing, except making less of you? Here’s a contemplation for you from Miroslav Volf and The Porter’s Gate Worship Project.


Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, 118-119.

We are good trees who bear good fruit, wrote the apostle Paul, because “we live by the Spirit”, whose fruit our gift giving is.

 

The Spirit counters our indolence as givers by molding our character to conform to Christ’s and employing our talents for others’ benefit. The Spirit also gives us hope. Often we experience a sense of futility in giving. We give, and recipients seem none the better off for it. Unscrupulous people insert themselves between our gifts and the recipient’s benefits, and gifts seem to disappear together with their intended benefits. Or recipients seem to receive gifts like a black hole sucks in light. Giving doesn’t make sense, not so much because we lose by giving but because the world doesn’t gain much. We give, but it seems to us that we aren’t mending the world.

 

What is the relationship between our gifts and others’ benefits? We tend to think of it in terms of cause and effect. The gift is the cause: the benefit is the effect. As causes produce effects, giving should produce benefits. Often that’s not what happens, so we despair of giving.

 

But in fact, our gifts and others’ benefits are not related as causes and effects. They are related as the cross and the resurrection. Christ gave his life on the cross — and it seems as though he died in vain. His disciples quickly deserted him, his cause was as dead as he was, and even his God seemed to have abandoned him. But then he was resurrected from the dead by the power of the Spirit. He was seated at the right hand of God and raised in the community of believers, his social body alive and growing on earth. Did Christ’s “gift of death” cause his own resurrection and its benefits for the world? It didn’t. The Spirit did. So it is with every true gift of our own, however small or large.

 

Like Christ’s healings or feeding of multitudes, often our gifts offer immediate help. We give, and the hungry are fed, the sorrowful comforted, and loved ones delighted. We are like a tree, laden with fruit that only waits to be picked. At other times, we give, and the gift seems less like a ripe fruit than like a seed planted in the ground. For a while, nothing happens. Dark earth covered with cold winter holds the seed captive. Then spring comes, and we see new life sprouting, maybe even growing beyond our wildest imagination.

 

Sometimes it seems as if a fate worse than lying in the dark earth befalls our gifts. It is almost as if some evil bird takes away the seed we planted before it can sprout and bear fruit. We labor in vain. We give — and it seems that no one benefits. Yet we can still hope. The Spirit who makes a tree heavy with fruit and who gives life to the seed that has died will ultimately claim every good gift that the evil one has snatched away. Just as the Spirit resurrected the crucified one and made his sacrifice bear abundant fruit, so the Spirit will raise us in the spring of everlasting life to see the harvest of our own giving. Our giving is borne by the wings of the Spirits’ hope.

7Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. 8Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. 9Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. 10Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. Galatians 6:7-10 (NIV)

 

Listen & Watch: We Labour Unto Glory, Porter’s Gate Worship Project

 

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRuPZCXShg4

 

Change, Discipleship, Giving, Leadership, Quotes, Work

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