Status Updates From A Long Obedience in the Sam...

Hoping is a confident, alert, expectation, that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it his way, and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God, but bullying God.

This is why we are able to face, acknowledge, and accept life through suffering: we know that it can never be ultimate, it can never constitute the bottom line.

A Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering. If we do not make that decision, we are endangered on every side. A manner woman of faith, who failed to acknowledge and deal with suffering becomes, at last, either a cynic, or a melancholic or a suicide.

Finding the meaning of our lives, not by probing our moods and motives in morals, but by believing and Godish whale and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not shining the rise and fall of our enthusiasm. It is out of such a reality that we acquire perseverance.

Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of Godish faithfulness. We survive in the way of Faith. Not because we have extraordinary stamina, but because God is righteous, because God sticks with us. Christian, discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to Godish, righteousness, and the less and less attention to our own.

This was one of the best chapters on humility I have ever read. I won't soon forget this line, "We are, alternatively, rebellious runaways and whining babies." (151)

This as far from the truth as the Easter is from the West. The easiest thing in the world is to be a Christian. What is hard is to be a sinner. Being a Christian is what we were created for. The life of faith has the support of an entire creation and the resources of a magnificent redemption. The structure of this world was created by God so we can live in it easily and happily as his children.