Stephen Mowry > Stephen's Quotes

“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career. ”
― C.S. Lewis

“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“The way you help heal the world is you start with your own family.”
― Mother Teresa

“Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”
― John Paul II

“Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

“The home is the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose, and that is to support the ultimate career.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.”
― Victor Hugo

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.”
― Walter Brueggemann

“A world without a Sabbath would be like a man without a smile, like summer without flowers, and like a homestead without a garden. It is the most joyous day of the week.”
― Henry Ward Beecher

“There are no guarantees that if we keep the Sabbath we will be successful. But honouring the Sabbath (and not overworking the other six days) will give us an opportunity to grow in our trust of God and experience his faithfulness. If we take time to honour the Sabbath we may actually find that we are less productive than we were before...God's provision for us as we honour his rhythms may be the grace to accept being passed over for a promotion, while gaining a greater sense of fulfillment as we do our work more aware of God, ourselves, and the people around us.”
― Ken Shigematsu, God in My Everything: How an Ancient Rhythm Helps Busy People Enjoy God

“Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world’s beauty and abundance.”
― Wendell Berry

“When practiced, Sabbath-keeping is an active protest against a culture that is always on, always available and always looking for something else to do.”
― Stephen W. Smith, Inside Job: Doing the Work Within the Work

“The whole love of the "Law" has been lavished on and has cherished the Sabbath. As the day of rest, it gives life its balance and rhythm; it sustains the week. Rest is something entirely different from a mere recess, from a mere interruption of work, from not working. A recess is something essentially physical, part of the earthly everyday sphere. Rest, on the other hand, is essentially religious, part of the atmosphere of the divine; it leads us to the mystery, to the depth from which all commandments come, too. It is that which re-creates and reconciles, the recreation in which the soul, as it were, creates itself again and catches the breath of life-- that in life which is sabbatical.”
― Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity: essays by Leo Baeck

“Jewish Law is like musical notation; it gives meaning to the stuff of life by regulating it in time. The Sabbath is its most sacred interval”
― Judith Shulevitz

“Christians and Jews hold in common one theological basis for hospitality: Creation. Creation is the ultimate expression of God's hospitality to His creatures. In the words of on rabbi, everything God created is a "manifestation of His kindness. [The] world is one big hospitality inn." As Church historian Amy Oden has put it, "God offers hospitality to all humanity... by establishing a home.. for all." To invite people into our homes is to respond with gratitude to the God who made a home for us.

In the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, we find another resource for hospitality. The trinity shows God in relationships with Himself. our Three-in-one God has welcomed us into Himself and invited us to participate in divine life. And so the invitation that we as Christians extend to one another is not simply an invitation into our homes or to our tables; what we ask of other people it that hey enter into our lives.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath

“God's Creation gives usa model for making and sharing homes with people, but the reality of God's Trinitarian life suggests that Christian hospitality goes farther than that. We are not meant simply to invite people into our homes, but also to invite them into our lives. Having guests and visitors, if we do it right, is not an imposition, because we are not meant to rearrange our lives for our guests - we are meant to invite our guests to enter into our lives as they are. It is this forging of relationships that transforms entertianment... into hospitality... As writer Karen Burton Mains puts it, "Visitors may be more than guests in our home. if they like, they may be friends.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath

“Frodo was now safe in the Last Homely House east of the Sea. That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, ‘a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.’ Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. ...Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. It is not to lead our neighbor into a corner where there are no alternatives left, but to open a wide spectrum of options for choice and commitment. It is not an educated intimidation with good books, good stories, and good works, but the liberation of fearful hearts so that words can find roots and bear ample fruit….The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free….not a subtle invitation to adopt the life style of the host, but the gift of a chance for the guest to find his own.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“A good way to rid one's self of a sense of discomfort is to do something. That uneasy, dissatisfied feeling is actual force vibrating out of order; it may be turned to practical account by giving proper expression to its creative character.”
― William Morris

“Beware of any work for God that causes or allows you to avoid concentrating on Him. A great number of Christian workers worship their work. The only concern of Christian workers should be their concentration on God. This will mean that all the other boundaries of life, whether they are mental, moral, or spiritual limits, are completely free with the freedom God gives His child; that is, a worshiping child, not a wayward one. A worker who lacks this serious controlling emphasis of concentration on God is apt to become overly burdened by his work. He is a slave to his own limits, having no freedom of his body, mind, or spirit. Consequently, he becomes burned out and defeated. There is no freedom and no delight in life at all. His nerves, mind, and heart are so overwhelmed that God’s blessing cannot rest on him.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

“There is a kind of listening with half an ear that presumes already to know what the other person has to say. It is an impatient, inattentive listening, that despises the brother and is only waiting for a chance to speak and thus get rid of the other person. This is no fulfillment of our obligation, and it is certain that here too our attitude toward our brother only reflects our relationship to God. It is little wonder that we are no longer capable of the greatest service of listening that God has committed to us, that of hearing our brother's confession, if we refuse to give ear to our brother on lesser subjects. Secular education today is aware that often a person can be helped merely by having someone who will listen to him seriously, and upon this insight it has constructed its own soul therapy, which has attracted great numbers of people, including Christians. But Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“God has prepared for Himself one great song of praise throughout eternity, and those who enter the community of God join in this song. It is the song that the “morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy” at the creation of the world. (Job 38:7). It is the victory song of the children of Israel after passing through the Red Sea, the Magnificat of Mary after the annunciation, the song of Paul and Silas in the night of prison, the song of the singers on the sea of glass after their rescue, the “song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb” (Rev. 15:3) It is the song of the heavenly fellowship.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“Christian community is like the Christian's sanctification. It is a gift of God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible

“Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is a just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution...Who can give us the certainty that, in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins, we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God? God gives us this certainty through our brother. Our brother breaks the circle of self-deception. A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community