Michael Kenning

“Augustine of Hippo: “In affliction, then, we do not know what it is right to pray for. Because affliction is difficult, troublesome and against the grain for us, weak as we are, we do what every human would do. We pray that it may be taken away from us. However, if he does not take it away, we must not imagine that he has forgotten us. In this way, power shines forth more perfectly in weakness.”
― Shane Claiborne, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

“Speaking honestly and with the benefit of hindsight, I realize that at that point in my life, I was overworking and hopelessly under-spiritual. That wasn’t my intention—in fact, I was very earnest in what I was doing and in what I believed. But it was all busyness, frantic activity. I hadn’t learned how to be with God, how to breath in His new life.”
― Andy Freeman, Punk Monk: New Monasticism and the Ancient Art of Breathing

“Peace is not just about the absence of conflict; it’s also about the presence of justice. Martin Luther King Jr. even distinguished between “the devil’s peace” and God’s true peace. A counterfeit peace exists when people are pacified or distracted or so beat up and tired of fighting that all seems calm. But true peace does not exist until there is justice, restoration, forgiveness. Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free.”
― Shane Claiborne, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

“If you have a choice between letting the doctor examine you right away, uncomfortable though it may be, and waiting until he or she can do a post-mortem on you after it’s too late, it’s wise to go for the first. If you open yourself, day by day and week by week, to the message of scripture, its grand sweep and its small details, and allow the faithful preaching of Jesus and his achievement to enter your consciousness and soak down into your imagination and heart, then the admittedly uncomfortable work of God’s word will be happening on a regular basis, showing you (as we say) where you really are, what’s going on deep inside. You may need help from someone else in this process. Just as the healing work of the early church didn’t mean that doctors became unnecessary, so the probing, searching, penetrating analysis of God’s word doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a job for psychotherapists and similar professionals. But nor do they make the task of the word unnecessary. To spend time, prayerfully and thoughtfully, with scripture and with Jesus, the written and living Word of God, is to know that gentle but powerful touch, like a very sharp and fine blade, producing surprising and perhaps alarming results.”
― Tom Wright, Hebrews for Everyone