For this blog post I simply want to share some short writings, or excerpts from writings, that have echoed within me and my journey so far during my time here in South Africa. Hope you enjoy, and who knows one of them may just change your life.
Peace
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
-Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world."
~ Harriet Tubman
"Simple. Faith is a gift, not something we intellectually achieve, or earn…..It's an ever changing relationship between you, God, and ALL God's creation. Faith is how we live into that gift (you already have it, it's obvious). Questions are a big part of deciding how we live into the gift. Questions and doubt don't mean there is no faith, rather, that the relationship between you and God is deepening and growing. Keep on the journey, Jesus is right beside you, even when you don't know or feel it, and especially when you're at your lowest or weakest."
- Luke Roehl (South Africa YAGM 2013-2014)
"Come in out of the cold, forget all that you know, because there's always been room by the fire for you."
- Tim Mcilrath (Rise Against)
"The trouble with creation is not that it is imperfect, but that it is perfectly misunderstood."
- Keenan Weatherford
"God, not psychological similarities or social circumstances, is our bond."
- Henri Nouwen from Solitude and Community
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
-- David Whyte
from Everything is Waiting for You
©2003 Many Rivers Press
"Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion...The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even--heaven help us--Biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically-rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way...with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom."
- N.T. Wright
To be of the Earth is to know
the restlessness of being a seed
the darkness of being planted
the struggle toward the light
the pain of growth into the light
the joy of bursting and bearing fruit
the love of being food for someone
the scattering of your seeds
the decay of the seasons
the mystery of death
and the miracle of birth
— John Soos, Earth Prayer
(quoted in Christ in a Grain of Sand: An Ecological Journey with the Spiritual Exercises)
One of the greatest dangers in the spiritual life is self-rejection. When we say, “If people really knew me, they wouldn’t love me,” we choose the road toward darkness. Often we are made to believe that self-deprecation is a virtue, called humility. But humility is in reality the opposite of self-deprecation. It is the grateful recognition that we are precious in God’s eyes and that all we are is pure gift. To grow beyond self-rejection we must have the courage to listen to the voice calling us God’s beloved sons and daughters, and the determination always to live our lives according to this truth.
- Henri Nouwen
"Participation in community in which I can experience the extremes of my life without shame, know that my fears will be truly understood, and that people will dance for joy with me as an equal is a blessing to be nurtured."
- Emily Kimball ( United Kingdom YAGM 2013-2014)
"Life is no straight and easy corridor along
which we travel free and unhampered,
but a maze of passages,
through which we must seek our way,
lost and confused, now and again
checked in a blind alley.
But always, if we have faith,
a door will open for us,
not perhaps one that we ourselves
would have ever thought of,
but one that will ultimately
prove good for us."
- A. J. Cronin
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It
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