Sam Bratt

“Fear is a kind of parenting fungus: invisible, insidious, perfectly designed to decompose your peace of mind. —Nancy Gibbs”
― Danny Kwon, A Youth Worker’s Field Guide to Parents: Understanding Parents of Teenagers

“Here is where many Christian parents make a decision that seems right on the surface, but I believe is all wrong if they hope to prepare their teenagers to be a redemptive influence in the cultural struggle. Like the Smiths, many Christian parents try their best to keep the surrounding culture out of their homes (cassette tapes, CDs, and videos). In so doing, they lose a wonderful, focused opportunity to teach their children how to use a biblical view of life to understand and critique their culture.”
― Paul David Tripp, Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide to Parenting Teens

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“The glory of God coming to earth does not only produce radically changed individuals, but a whole new kind of human community—the church. Paul writes: “But our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:19–20). The word translated as “citizenship” is politeuma, a word that is better translated as “commonwealth” or “colony.” It means a politically organized body with both laws and loyalties that govern the behavior of its citizens. Literally it tells Christians that their politics—the way they conduct themselves in society—is to be based on the life of “heaven.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter