Rachel M

“This is the church. Here she is. Lovely, irregular, sometimes sick and sometimes well. This is the body-like-no-other that God has shaped and placed in the world. Jesus lives here; this is his soul’s address. There is a lot to be thankful for, all things considered. She has taken a beating, the church. Every day she meets the gates of hell and she prevails. Every day she serves, stumbles, injures, and repairs. That she has healed is an underrated miracle. That she gives birth is beyond reckoning. Maybe it’s time to make peace with her. Maybe it’s time to embrace her, flawed as she is.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“emotion, though a devotional life leads to a sensitivity of feelings. It is the rhythms and moments of our days, weeks, months, and years that open communing space. Devotion isn’t ritual, but it is ritualistic. It isn’t working, but it is about works. It’s about laying hold of our lives in such a way that they become containers for the Spirit of God to fill, creating a counter-liturgy to the gravitational draw of technology, entertainment, and the endless purchasing of things. I’ve learned over the years that devotion isn’t reliant on how spiritually powerful we feel we are. If we have seconds, minutes, and hours in our day, then we can devote our lives to a living affection for God. Because devotion is about making space, and we all have it in some shape or form. When we wake in the morning, we can choose to devote time to God in the same way we devote our bodies to food, hygiene, and exercise. We don’t call those things ritualistic or religious; we don’t have breakfast with a sense of romanticism and heightened emotional experience. We do those things because we’re alive and because they’re good. Becoming a people of prayer is saying that as worthy as our stomachs are of food, our bodies are of cleansing, our lungs are of breathing, God is even more of our attention. And it’s about building habits throughout our day to live into it. If we leave eating to chance, we’ll likely find ourselves oscillating between irritable hunger and satisfaction. Likewise with God, without planning in rhythm, we’ll experience Him in boom and bust. Seasons of wonder and seasons of confusion and frustration.”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God

“roads are rarely what they appear to be and are not predictable. Maybe safe is about the company you keep and not about the road you take?”
― Wm. Paul Young, Eve

“You have the freedom to trust and the freedom to turn. This is the profound and sometimes painful mystery of community and love.”
― Wm. Paul Young, Eve