Susan Kendrick > Recent Status Updates

Spiritual maturity holds on to the future hope of being with God one day forever, fixing our eyes on what is before us. Donald Whitney says that "whether you realize it or not, everything you do is for eternity. Nothing has an impact only on this life."4 Every morning that we wake up with breath still in our chests is an opportunity to remember our upward call of God in Christ.

Showed Jack a picture of a man who had been scalped and he said typical.

Benton McKaye’s last name is pronounced McKigh. I did not know.

Someone mentioned that the clubs had always operated with four rules and one guest began searching her memory to recall them.
Without hesitation, Corrie listed them: "Seek strength through prayer; be open and trustworthy; bear your difficulties cheerfully; and develop the gifts that God gave you." The rules were fresh in her mind.

I grew up climbing mountains: no stranger to heights. I never felt important there. If anything I felt small, worshipful, embraced by something large, but not large myself. But atop Seattle’s Smith Tower I felt large, important. My adolescent imagination was being trained by Herod. I was immersed in a Herodian world where size and wealth define human condition. I still live in that world but am no longer impressed.

This book is just what I need right now. I am really enjoying it.

A significant amount of time is now spent in search of wall outlets. Anyone delayed at an airport can plainly view this phenomenon. With our devices comes the promise of constant connection with the external world. But with this promise also comes the price of constant disconnection from our internal self, where, by the way, the Holy Spirit indwells and awaits our attention.

Neuroscientists tell us that acts of kindness release endorphins, neurotransmitters that alleviate pain and lower blood pressure. God has designed our bodies to benefit from genuine kindness both when we receive it and when we offer it. Kindness is God's medicine.

“Again the road brings us close to the brink of Millard Canyon and here we see something like a little shrine mounted on a post. We stop. The wooden box contains a register book for visitors, brand-new, with less than a dozen entries, put here by the BLM—Bureau of Land Management. ‘Keep the tourists out,’ some tourist from Salt Lake City has written. As fellow tourists we heartily agree.” -ABSOLUTE BANGER

“A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska, but I am grateful that it’s there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.”

lol so much philosophical ranting in between beautiful descriptions of the Utah landscape. Honestly he is right on some things but just so much disdain for the general population.

I had forgotten how much I enjoy his writing style, even if I don’t agree with all of his ideas. He makes me think, which I greatly appreciate.

To engage with the fruit of the Spirit is not just to understand or to better recognize that fruit, as useful as that may be. It is, rather, to deepen our relationship with our source, the wild untamed Spirit of God, who brings to maturity a way of life that is both countercultural and immediately recognizable as home.

Really enjoying this so far.

So far an absolute banger; far and away my favorite of his books.

“In her also I found what I liked best—an unfailing, kindly welcome without a hint of sentimentality, unruffled good sense, the unobtrusive talent for making all things at all times as cheerful and comfortable as circumstances allowed. What one could not have one did without and made the best of it.”

“How can you enjoy anything about life if you know that, in the end, the more you love something the more it will hurt when you lose it? That joy comes only if Jesus can deliver on his promise of eternal life—not an angelic, bodiless realm among the clouds, but a new world in which the things we love don’t pass away.“

“Our success in treating a wide variety of once-fatal problems has blinded us to the fact that you have to die of something. Every time we cure one disease another will eventually rise to take its place. So many people die of cancer now because they aren’t dying much earlier of influenza or smallpox or bacterial infection.”

“If the ICU represents our all-out attempt to beat back death, it is also in a sense a monument to death’s power. Here modern medicine is to death what a comb-over is to a balding scalp. We may shield the reality for a time. But at some point the comb-over is no more than a monument to the power of baldness. The harder we try, the more obvious our weakness and the more obvious death’s power.”

So, according to [moralists], Christianity is that which makes men and women miserable, which makes them feel that they are always failures. They try to be better, and they cannot succeed, but they must go on trying because it is the only way to get into the kingdom of God, into heaven. It is by your life and your own activities that you do it; so you go on trying…you ‘scorn delights and live laborious days.’

“There are now more self-storage facilities in the United States than McDonald’s, Burger King’s, Starbucks, and Walmarts—combined.”

1st chapter was a banger. MLJ can bring it.

I’m listening to KB read his audiobook and IT IS AMAZING!

“The backsliding believer can only be distinguished from the final apostate, by the fact of his recovery.”

True faith is suffused with penitence.

“An entire and confident reliance on the promises and providence of God, however dark may be your horizon, or however many difficulties environ you, is a sign that you have learned to live by faith.”