Month: December 2012

The First Time Around Always Sucks: But That’s Growth

If you ever look back on your old creations — sketches, journals, dance moves, videos, or that squeaky song you wrote for the girl in sixth grade who didn’t know you — you will always cringe at your amateurish recklessness.

The first time through your masterful brilliant brainchild, you probably thought it was the greatest idea in the world. Now you run from it as fast as your friends bring it up to you.

But: we all go through this. It’s a clumsy, gaudy, lumbering phase of growth that requires a purging of all your awkward first moments, and it’s absolutely necessary.

It’s also okay. You can embrace the process and shed the old skin and keep pursuing your perfection. You’ll look back a year from now and possibly hate what you’ve made today — but that’s only a natural part of your growth. One day you won’t look back on any one single thing you’ve done, but rather see an entire mosaic in a single-hall museum of your creative journey: and that’s life. It’s a collaboration with yourself.

Continue reading “The First Time Around Always Sucks: But That’s Growth” →

Quote: Be The Person


My generation is gruesomely lonely, but in response, we don’t need another handout, another kind gesture, or a better bible study. We don’t need more people that will merely know our name and address or care for us sporadically and at arms length. We need big, reimagined, Jesus kind of love, and people willing to sacrifice themselves in order to live it with us. We need people who will love us enough to get messy. So be deeply involved. Be covered in someone’s tears. Be the person who gets the call at midnight. Be the person who hears the gory details when someone’s marriage or career falls apart. Be the person who tells someone the hard stuff that they need to hear but no one wants to say. Be the person who repeatedly gets someone else’s mud and blood all over you. Be the person who goes home a little uncomfortable at night, not because of your behavior and thoughts, but because you’ve been near enough to someone else’s. Be a family member to the lonely, messy people of this world, and to my generation.

— Josh Riebock


Originally posted here.


Quote: Called Grace


This whole grace-thing makes it feel too easy, as if these “bad people” can walk into church and catch up to the good people. Let’s make it hard for them, am-I-right? Because there ought to be something we can do for grace. Never mind that it’s called grace.

— from this post

Quote: Love Became


Love became flesh.
Love showed us the way.
Love was betrayed.
Love was killed.
Love was resurrected.
Love endures.
Love wins.

What amazing love. Jesus.

— Eugene Cho


Quote: Jesus We Might


Jesus – the Jesus we might discover if we really looked! – is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we – than the church! – had ever imagined. We have successfully managed to hide behind other questions (admittedly important ones) and to avoid the huge, world-shaking challenge of Jesus’ central claim and achievement. It is we, the churches, who have become the real reductionists. We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself.

— N.T. Wright

Quote: Your Theology


If your theology is not pushing you towards a seriously grief-filled heart for real living human beings and to say I love you Jesus, it’s not a theology worth having. If your theology does not allow you to rejoice, cry out, smile, sing, and have fun, that really sucks. If your theology does not encourage you, but condemns you and puts you on eggshells and makes you constantly anxious about ‘having right doctrine,’ that’s pretty lame.

Who cares if you win the internet? What I care about is you look me in the eye and you love me. That the Holy Spirit is working. That you love Jesus. People can tell if you don’t. They only need to see your blog.

— from this post

Quote: Unchanging Heart


Trust that even when you mess this up, you walk out from here and you just lose it on somebody, and right afterwards you feel that guilt — ‘The pastor just preached on that!’ — just remember: God still loves you, God understands your struggle, God accepts you exactly as you are, God has cast all your sins into the ocean of forgiveness, and He is still rooting for you. He loves you. And He’s going to keep loving you to a better place. It’s God’s unchanging heart that will change your heart. So if you mess up this whole thing, I’m just telling you: it’s okay. Recompose, regroup, don’t stay in that guilt. That’s where Satan would love you to stay. Just stand up and God’s going to keep saying, ‘Get up again, get up again, let’s do this again.’ God’s going to keep rooting for you, and He will never stop loving you.

— from this podcast

Quote: Never Alone


You are called to carry the cross, deny yourself, kill your flesh, lose your life, and leave behind the world: but you are never alone in this. The one who calls you to follow him is the very one who empowers you to follow. Grace will cost you your pride, greed, anger, lust, sorrow, and selfishness — and in turn you get endless joy, eternal life, intimacy with our Creator, and reckless freedom to love. It feels like sacrifice because we are used to our way, but you give up what you never needed anyway. It remains the Best Deal in the Universe.


Quote: Fully Human


Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history, and life is all about. If you favor money, power, and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality. It is impossible to stay fully human if you refuse the cost of forgiveness, the substitutional exchange of love, and the confinements of community. We believe the world was made by a God who is a community of persons who have loved each other for all eternity. You were made for mutually self-giving, other directed love. Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made.

— Timothy Keller

Quote: But Stay


The ones who see your pain, all the real and raw depth of your hurt, but stay: those are the ones you never want to forget.


Quote: Vulnerable


To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

— C.S. Lewis