Ella McKinlay

“Metaphor does not explain; it does not define; it draws us away from being outsiders into being insiders, involved with all reality spoken into being by God’s word. . . . Metaphor sends out tentacles of connectedness. As we find ourselves in the tumble and tangle of metaphors in Scripture we realize that we are not schoolboys and schoolgirls reading about God, gathering information or “doctrine” that we can study and use; we are residents in a home interpenetrated by spirit – God’s Spirit, my spirit, your spirit. The metaphor makes us part of what we know.

(Eat This Book)”
― Eugene Peterson

“Spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized to the menial status of producers, and performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries. But there is far more to us than our usefulness and our reputation, where we’ve been and who we know; there is the unique, irreproducible, eternal, image-of-God me. A vigorous assertion of personal dignity is foundation to spirituality.

(Eat This Book)”
― Eugene Peterson

“It is difficult to recapture… the incongruity of a person self-designated as Son of Man, hanging pierced and bleeding on a cross. The incongruity is … even more offensive when this Son of Man has dinner with a prostitute, stops off for lunch with a tax collector, wastes time blessing children when there were Roman legions to be chased from the land, heals unimportant losers and ignores high achieving Pharisees and influential Sadducees. Jesus juxtaposed the most glorious title available to him [the Son of Man] with the most menial of lifestyles in the culture. He talked like a King and acted like a slave…

He was, in fact, Son of Man ‘given dominion and glory and kingdom’, he was, in fact, completely at home in the ordinary, the everyday, the common. He did not give an inch in either direction: he was very God, very man.

(Reversed Thunder)”
― Eugene Peterson

“To paint a picture of a dream life can be more appealing than an average reality and it is exciting and flattering to be in this bubble. But you can’t live in a painting. Real life takes sustained effort, slow progress and compromise.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Instant