Noah > Recent Status Updates

“If we’re going to pray for God to protect and provide for the foreigner, the widows and the vulnerable, we also should be willing to be the answer to our own prayers”.

“When people enter into the community of the people of God, we don’t just teach them doctrine. We tell them a story, we practice living into that story, and we follow that story with our calendar”

“When the church becomes accidental to Christianity, the weekly gathering becomes merely a social opportunity to co form our prior personal experience with God”

“Community is…the greatest safeguard we have against misusing Scripture, misunderstanding it, or misapplying it - especially when it comes to our own politically influenced biases and blinders.”

“The meaning of the word political…signifies the means by which we shape our common life together…there are many reason why American evangelicals are uncomfortable with prioritizing the social/political aspects of the gospel. But…the gospel comes with an ethical imperative to love our neighbor, and Scripture is clear that loving our neighbor means opposing social and political barriers to the flourishing”.

“When we go before him, God will ask, ‘Where are your wounds?’ And we will say, ‘I have no wounds.’ And God will ask, ‘Was there nothing worth fighting for?’”

“The prophets…communicate…idolatry as…capitulation to a different story and set of values. Idols make promises of protection and provision and they require allegiance”.

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand

John Green didn’t write that, but he pointed me towards it, and I will never forget it.

“It’s easy”, Morgan said. “All you have to do in remember that you’re giving someone a very great gift. The greatest.”

“Magic?” rose could not hide her doubt.

“Attention,” she said.
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“She tried to remind herself of everything she knew….that all of this was a lie. But as she watched…Rose believed it anyway” - pg. 239

“What you think you’re looking for”, she said, “and what you are looking for, are two very different things”…..”You’ve come to us,” the woman went on, “because you want to find out the difference”.

“We made quite the pair - two broken people, too old for our dreams, who had never quite managed to find our place in the world. “

“Whatever you could accuse Cecelia of, you could never doubt Cecelia’s innocence. It was the one quality that made you forgive her everything else - the fact that Cecelia felt so strongly, that she meant so well, that she could never even countenance deceit.” - pig. 72-73

“The injured look on Cecelia’s face when Rose said this made Rose feel like quitting painting had been some kind of betrayal instead of something that happens to everyone who grows up”

“There is no virtue in advertising one’s sadness. But there is no wisdom in denying it either. And there is the beautiful possibility that great I’ve can grow out of sadness if it is well tended. Sadness can make us bitter or wise. We get to choose” - pg. 214

“He was looking through the core of the earth to a rice paddy nine thousand miles and five decades away.” - pg. 186

“Mastery of the genre is essential for yet one more reason: Screenwriting is not for sprinters, but for long distance runners…..Genre should be a constant source if reinspiration….of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures is through time is love of the work itself” - pg. 98-99.

“Humor is one means the therapist can use to try to break this grim mood, hoping to wake the family out of their hypnotic trance where all is desperation and struggle” - pg. 112

“For a while, we were social, that process of reassuring ourselves that we could be casual with one another, a ritual protection from the intensity that was to follow and perhaps a necessary prelude to it” - pg 12

Even small talk on the way to a session can be a way of reassuring a nervous participant - “It’s not going to be so scary, there’s always emotional safety available”.

“The cost of your good habits are in the present, the cost of your bad habits are in the future”.

"The nights were so brief and the days so warm, they dried out quickly and napped in the leaf-filtered sunlight, drowsing in the warmth, contented and lazy as dogs by firelight" - pg. 227