Deliver Us From Me-Ville Quotes

“Journeys are regularly marked by an early exhilaration followed by a waning resolve to finish.”
― David A. Zimmerman, Deliver Us From Me-Ville

“And me? I’m a mess. I’m nothing and have nothing: make something of me. You can do it; you’ve got what it takes— but God, don’t put it off. (Ps. 40:17)”
― David A. Zimmerman, Deliver Us From Me-Ville

“A boundary which I am unable to cross … lies between me and me, the old and the new “I.” It is in the encounter with this boundary that I shall be judged.… At this place stands Christ, between me and me, the old and the new existence. Thus Christ is at one and the same time, my boundary and my rediscovered centre. In the fallen world the centre is also the boundary. Man stands between law and fulfillment. He has the law, but he cannot fulfil it. Now Christ stands where man has failed before the law. Christ as the centre means that he is the fulfillment of the law. So he is in turn the boundary and judgement of man, but also the beginning of his new existence, its centre.”
― David A. Zimmerman, Deliver Us From Me-Ville

“In the consecration of the temple, Solomon was giving voice to an intuitive paradox of the Jewish faith: An unapproachable God chooses to abide with his people.”
― David A. Zimmerman, Deliver Us From Me-Ville

“Adam and Eve each denied their own responsibility when confronted by God because they saw themselves as too important to be wrong, to be weak, to be vulnerable to the shrewdness of a mere serpent. The dramatic increase in self-importance over the turn of the millennium, occurring alongside a steady increase in divorce, white-collar crime, morbid obesity, and high-profile falls from grace, smacks of a similar stink. We’re too important for silly rules. We can’t be expected to keep promises we made after circumstances change. Give us enough time, and we’ll figure out who’s really to blame for the trouble we find ourselves in. Jake”
― David A. Zimmerman, Deliver Us From Me-Ville

“Generation Me is the first generation raised to believe that everyone should have high self-esteem.2 That doesn’t mean, of course, that everybody has high self-esteem. Many people clearly don’t. Consistently rising rates of depression suggest that countless people still think themselves unimportant, but the parallel rise in self-injury as a habit (cutting, for instance, or various eating disorders) hints at a more insidious social problem: People with poor self-image punish themselves for it.3 Society doesn’t consider high self-esteem merely healthy; it considers it noble.”
― David A. Zimmerman, Deliver Us From Me-Ville