Flunking Sainthood Quotes

“It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start. — MOTHER TERESA”
― Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. — ANNE FRANK”
― Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor

“To help me learn how to practice lectio divina, I’ve enlisted two expert sources. Eugene Peterson opens his book on spiritual reading with an analogy of us reading Scripture like a dog might gnaw a bone. His dog is joyful to have the bone; for a time he plays with it and enjoys having others interact with it. Then he settles in to chew it in a more private area, turning it over for a long time, then burying it only to retrieve it again later and pick up where he left off. Peterson says that in Hebrew, the word we tamely translate as “meditate” on the Scriptures actually means “growl,” like an animal growls over its prey. God wants us to growl in triumph over the Bible before settling in to wrestle with it and worry it like a bone. It’s a marvelous image.”
― Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor

“The Bible isn’t really at all good at being an instruction manual. It’s good at leading us into a tangle of wild poetry, heartbreaking stories, contradictions, twists and turns, the concrete struggles of a vast array of unruly, disparate human beings being sought after by God. . . . The Bible isn’t a cage that contains God, making God available to take out or hang in our living room, it’s a witness to the fecund, ungraspable Other (and our relationship to that Other). — DEBBIE BLUE”
― Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor

“Marva Dawn’s a Christian who draws on Jewish traditions. She looks to the Sabbath as a way off the treadmill of evaluating our worthiness based on how many items we’ve crossed off a list each day. I am usually guilty of measuring my worth by my productivity: did I meet my word quota today? The Sabbath, to paraphrase Dawn, is God’s way of letting us know that he’s not following us around with a clipboard, quantifying his love based on how much we’ve done for him lately. He’s our parent, and “parents raise children primarily by who they are, not by what they do.”
― Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor

“this lovely paraphrase on me from St. Teresa:   Place yourself in the presence of Christ. Don’t wear yourself out thinking. Simply speak with your Beloved. Delight in him. Lay your needs at his feet. Acknowledge that he doesn’t have to allow you in his presence. (But he does!) There is a time for thinking, And a time for being. Be. With him.”
― Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor

“A dairymaid can milk cows to the glory of God. — MARTIN LUTHER”
― Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor

“You see that I am a very little soul who can offer to God only very little things. — ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX”
― Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor

“There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less. — G. K. CHESTERTON”
― Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor

“When the Bible commands us to be thankful, that gratitude is almost never about us or about the material comforts of our little lives. It’s about being thankful for God and for his “steadfast love” (Ps. 118, 106, 107), not just for what he’s done for us lately.”
― Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor