The Last Sweet Mile Quotes

“If it could be done without upsetting the perfect peace of heaven, I like to imagine that somehow our words, our prayers, the love of many rose up to meet you today.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“a prayer that God will keep me at the place where I was when every day was about one thing—loving the weak (you) and trusting the strong (Him).”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“I tell people, to their obvious surprise, that the year you and I shared with cancer was the best year of my life. Difficult and hurtful, yes. But by any measure that really matters—depth of purpose, intensity of focus, freedom from triviality, honesty of affection, genuineness of love and joy and peace, reliance on and trust in God—it was “The Year” for me. To be with my favorite person every day, to relive so much shared history, and to be free from the petty cares that so often clutter my life added up to something for which I can find no words. I wish, of course, that I’d never experienced it, especially knowing how difficult it was for you, but I’m grateful.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“You cannot love Christ too much. You cannot serve Him too fervently. You cannot enjoy Him too deeply. You cannot know Him too well.” He would forever and emphatically point us Christ-ward. But he would also want to express highest praise and deepest thanks to each of you. For the long-running jokes, the good-natured sibling banter, the teasing that only exists among people who are safe in each other’s affection, for all the short conversations that left him glad-hearted, he would say thank you.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“Since the children have flesh and blood, [Jesus] too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. —Hebrews 2:14–15 niv”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“We continue to walk through a season which requires us to trust that the head-scratching ways of God are not just higher, but better than we could ever imagine, and that the day of the hand-clapping trees is the reality for which we are destined.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“human wisdom is at best a dim light in a dense forest on a dark night.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“And what is friendship, rightly lived, but the unheroic call to a thousand small conversations, countless prayers, and a myriad of encouraging words from one person to another over a lifetime? What is it but the bearing of burdens, the sharing of gifts, the asking of uncomfortable questions, and the possible discomfort of necessary confrontation?”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“I did not save the world today,
Or change the course of history,
I walked the small and quiet way,
The life that God has given me. I woke up with the morning sun,
I sat awhile to think and pray,
I did my work till the day was done,
But I did not save the world today. I tried to live with gratitude,
To do the good that I could do,
To love the people close to me,
My neighbors and my family,
To share the kindness I’ve been shown,
To trust the Love that is my home,
To celebrate the tiny part I play,
But I did not save the world today. I hear the politicians speak,
Such big ideas and lofty claims,
My life, to theirs, seems small and weak,
But in God’s big hand we weigh the same. The saints and poets seem to know,
The law behind the ocean tide,
The world gets changed and moved along,
By little gestures multiplied. So I try to live with gratitude,
To do the good that I can do,
To love the people close to me,
My neighbors and my family,
To share the kindness I’ve been shown,
To trust the Love that is my home,
To celebrate the tiny part I play,
But I did not save the world today.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“Christmas takes us prisoner, makes us inescapably people of faith and hope and love. And knowing that to be true, the angel can sing now, as he did then, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“The love of Christ is expansive, far reaching. It sees opportunity everywhere. Marketplace, soup kitchen, lunchroom, ball field, neighborhood, distant lands—the church goes “around” to make the gospel known in the world.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“Gary’s perspective on what it meant to serve others was significantly shaped by the importance that Jesus attached to seemingly insignificant objects: cups of water, coins, seeds of grain, hairs of the head, sparrows. They, as much or more than the miraculous or spectacular, struck Gary as the substance from which the Kingdom of God is built. Likewise, small things done kindly and well.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“all of life is worship—“the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration” for God.22”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“I once heard it said that we don’t read the Bible to get a good self-image. We read it instead to get an accurate self-image, meaning a clear perception that includes our glory and our grime, that recognizes the miracles and the messes that we are. Jesus, the prophets, the apostles, and the saints through the ages, instead of trivializing or ignoring the more troubling aspects of our being—the self-righteousness and the sorrows—spoke with clarity about them and, accordingly, treated the wound of the people as though it were serious.15 It is serious. As is the cure. Another question in that Thursday morning discussion was this: “Who was the saddest man who ever lived?” Someone put forth the possibility that if wisdom increases our sorrow, as Ecclesiastes says it will, then the wisest”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“In a world saturated with advertisers, half truth, and empty promises, the Word of God is refreshingly blunt.  ”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“there is a sadness that is wise, honest, and appropriate if we are seeing the world around us with compassionate eyes.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“To be clear, sad, to Gary, did not mean unuseful. Sad did not mean defeated. Sad did not mean ungrateful or ill-tempered. Sad did not mean unjoyful. And sad certainly did not mean idle. Gary saw no contradiction in loving this world but longing, at the same time, for the better world to come. His belief in heaven is what made him so tirelessly active in doing good in the various places he lived. When he prayed, “Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven,” he did not have only a future “new heavens and new earth” in mind. He was thinking of Hamilton and Sarajevo and Pola de Siero and Mazar-e-Sharif. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a nineteenth century pastor from England and one of Gary’s favorite to read, wrote”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“Gary encouraged me to cultivate a healthy respect for the damage that sin has inflicted and is inflicting on the world. He taught me to accept sadness as a temporary part of that damage and to see that my deepest longings can be awakened in this world but not totally fulfilled by it. He reminded me often to set my heart on things above.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“There’s nothing wrong with freedom—Jesus came to set us free, after all; there’s nothing inherently wrong with getting a lot; and there’s nothing wrong with being happy, but only if those things are understood in light of Jesus’ teachings and only if our pursuit of them is governed by His definition of love.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“I don’t recall everything that was said in our conversation that morning, but there was a near consensus among the old guard that life, lived honestly, is a saddening journey. The line of reasoning seemed to run thus: How could any healthy, loving soul see the ruination, the suffering, the self-induced hardships of humanity and not be disheartened by them? No one present that morning would have argued with Job’s pronouncement that “man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“there is good laughter; laughter that in some way gives voice to a belief that, in the end, the love of God will prevail over every dark thing. It is the overflow of a soul that has seen, if only slightly, into the heart of Christ. Such laughter has mass to it. It is tethered to something huge and holy. It is the laughter of the ransomed returning home.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“I don’t laugh at all like I used to. Can’t. The experiences we shared, the language we cultivated, and the lens through which we viewed the world had shaped a key, one of a kind, and placed it exclusively in his hand. It fit my humor in a way that none other does and opened the room where my deepest laughter lived—the kind that is immediate, unguarded, invigorating, and sincere. And nothing made Gary laugh like making someone else laugh.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“Technically, this land is not a farm. We do not and never have row-cropped it nor grown animals for sale. Our crop, if we have such, is pine trees. And beauty. And memories. In that regard, this is rich ground, steeped in the sacredness of small things. Gary’s”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“Increasingly, I am convinced that the Kingdom of God moves forward most enduringly when ordinary people do small things kindly and well over a long period of time.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“songs might dispel his anxiousness, I turned on Peace Like a River, your recording of hymns. I wish,”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile

“One does not learn of Christ or read the Bible for information, but for transformation.”
― Allen Levi, The Last Sweet Mile