Loraena

“Prayer is a means of bringing our authentic self to God and meeting him in these mysteries. We pray because we hope and believe that surrender can be forged there, on our knees. We pray because sometimes this is all we can do when desire and the undesirable have us knotted inside. We pray because, when the woods have gone dark, when the distance between God’s Word says it and I believe it feels like impossible terrain to travel and our only companions are doubt and fear, we need words as simple as these: Your will be done.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“We expect God to be, as we might say, ‘in charge’: taking control, sorting things out, getting things done. But the God we see in Jesus is the God who wept at the tomb of his friend. The God we see in Jesus is the God-the-Spirit who groans without words. The God we see in Jesus is the one who, to demonstrate what his kind of ‘being in charge’ would look like, did the job of a slave and washed his disciples’ feet.”
― N.T. Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath

“there is so little of our own maturity and growth that we actually superintend. “I cannot transform myself, or anyone else for that matter. What I can do is create the conditions in which spiritual transformation can take place, by developing and maintaining a rhythm of spiritual practices that keep me open and available to God.”1 We give grace accessibility to our hearts when we engage in intentional spiritual practices. One important spiritual practice is the practice of confession. As Andy Crouch writes, As for Christians, well, we really have just one thing going for us. We have publicly declared . . . that we are desperately in need of Another to give us his righteousness, to complete us, to live in us. We have publicly and flagrantly abandoned the project of self-justification that is at the heart of every person’s compulsion to manage perceptions. . . . This means telling the world—before the world does its own investigative journalism—that we’re not as bad as they think sometimes. We’re worse. . . . If we’re being honest about our own beauty and brokenness, the beautiful broken One will make himself known to our neighbors.2 Confession allows us to be the worst of sinners and yet remain confident that God is committed to us still. Holy desire is best”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Jesus’ answer puts paid to any easy-going vending-machine theology (one sin in, one punishment out). ‘He didn’t sin,’ replied Jesus, ‘nor did his parents. It happened so that God’s works could be seen in him.’ (John 9.1–3) Jesus, in other words, doesn’t look back to a hypothetical cause which would enable the onlookers to feel smug that they had understood some inner cosmic moral mechanism, some sin that God had had to punish. He looks forward to see what God is going to do about it. That translates directly into what he, Jesus, is going to do about it. For he is the light of the world.”
― N.T. Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath