Ryan

“Shame keeps craning our necks to look at our past with downcast eyes, as a life to regret. There are highly spiritualized forms of this fixation that parade themselves as holiness. But in fact this is the antithesis to grace. Shame lives off the lie of spiritual self-improvement, which is why my past is viewed as a failure. Grace lives off the truth of God’s wonder-working mercy—my past, my story, is taken up into God and God’s story. God is writing a new chapter of my life, not starting a new book after throwing out the first draft of my prior existence. Shame denies that our very being is possibility, whereas grace, by nature, is futural. Grace is the good news of unfathomable possibility. God’s sanctifying presence in my life doesn’t erase what’s gone before. Indeed, what God has prepared for me depends on what has gone before. My personal history isn’t something to regret; it is something God can deploy in ways I never could have imagined.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“Intimacy in all human relationships—especially with God—can occur only as vulnerability and inadequacy are owned.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“To love someone is to grant him or her the gift of one’s pure and undivided attention, without preconceived expectations of what the other person needs, what we imagine to be best in the situation, what particular results we want to engineer.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality