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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Living the gospel, then, is less about “thinking outside the box” than about choosing to live in this ever-widening circle of inclusion.
It’s a “good” tired because it was spent in extension to another. The exhausted God is always greater than the exalted one.
Like a caring parent, God receives our childlike painting of a tree—usually an unrecognizable mess—and delights in it. God doesn’t hand it back and say, “Come back when it looks more like a tree” or tell us how to improve it. God simply delights in us.
After all, nothing depends on how things turn out—only on how you see them when they happen.
Often enough, we get in the habit of shaking our fists at God and saying, WHAT do you WANT from me? We are programmed this way as humans. But I suppose it would be more accurate to ask God this: What do you want FOR me? For starters: life, happiness, and peace: My joy yours. Your joy complete. That’s it. Nothing less than that.
Meditate on the world, he instructed them, and all that happens in it,
Isma has learned how to savor the delight rather than wait for it to show up, to be constantly on the lookout for the holy in each moment. Buttering the sky.
Judgment creates the distance that moves us away from each other.
The embrace of our own suffering helps us to land on a spiritual intimacy with ourselves and others. For if we don’t welcome our own wounds, we will be tempted to despise the wounded.
Pema Chödrön invites us to “let ourselves be nailed to the present moment.” Certainly, if we live in the past, we will be depressed. If we live in the future,
we are guaranteed anxiety. Now is always vast and new.
The more you take things personally, the more you suffer. You observe it, hold it up to the light, release it, and move on.
One can choose to let suffering be the elevator to a heightened place of humble loving.
You adjust the knot on the red string around your wrist and fin...
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The task at hand is not to change behavior but rather to see clearly.
They befriend their wound to keep them from despising their woundedness. “Keep your loneliness warm,” Thich Nhat Hanh tells us. Our brokenness is meant to be kept close.
The goal is not perfection but a wholeness anchored in grateful living, in knowing what you have.
Peeling our fingers from around perfection’s throat, we can gain access to our worth and breathe easier at our human proclivity to get things wrong.
When the feeling’s mutual, we are seized by a tenderness that elevates us to the very largeness of God.
Community is the singular place where patience and steadiness can be practiced, compassion can be expanded, and gratitude can be nurtured.
hearts elevated above the opaque thickness that surrounds us all sometimes.
