Status Updates From Run with the Horses: The Qu...

“parody of prayer …the person across the table is Self and the waiter is God. This waiter-God is essential but peripheral. You can’t have the dinner without him, but he is not an intimate participant in it. He is someone to whom you give orders, make complaints, and maybe, at the end, give thanks. The person you are absorbed in is Self—your moods, your ideas, your interests,”

“Jeremiah had seen potters at work all his life, but today he saw something else—he saw God at work making a people for his glory. A people of God. Persons created in the image of God. Necessary but not only necessary—each one also beautiful. And beautiful but not only beautiful—each one also necessary. … There is no human being who is not useful with a part to play in what God is doing. “

pottery is immense. But there is something else that is just as important. No one has ever been able to make a clay pot that is just a clay pot. Every pot is also an art form. Pottery is always changing its shape as potters find new proportions, different ways to shape the pots in pleasing combinations of curves.”

“The great masters of the imagination do not make things up out of thin air; they direct our attention to what is right before our eyes. They then train us to see it whole—not in fragments but in context, with all the connections. They connect the visible and the invisible, the this with the that.”…

“The event of the wedding without the life of marriage doesn’t amount to much. It hardly matters if the man and woman dress up in their wedding clothes and re-enact the ceremony every anniversary and say “I’m married, I’m married, I’m married” if there is no daily love shared, if there is no continuing tenderness, no attentive listening, no inventive giving, no creative blessing.”

“We live in a culture where image is everything and substance nothing. We live in a culture where a new beginning is far more attractive than a long follow-through. Images are important. Beginnings are important. But an image without substance is a lie. A beginning without a continuation is a lie.”

“William Stafford was once asked in an interview, “When did you decide to be a poet?” He responded that the question was put wrongly: everyone is born a poet—a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing, he said, what everyone starts out doing. “The real question is why did the other people stop?””