“To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means that living so that “I’m only human” does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.”

Excerpt above from ——pp. 117-118 An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor HarperOne Publishers Copyright 2009

Photography by Bill Dahl – All Rights Reserved – 2010

Maybe it also means it’s OK to drop to your knees to shed a few tears when life kicks sand in your eyes…..by Bill Dahl

Mark Twain – The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain, Alex Ayres, 2005 Edition, Harper & Row New York, NY, p. 67

“Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down, and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them.” – Page 150 – Greg Mortenson – Three Cups of Tea – One Man’s Mission To Promote Peace…One School at a Time

Results

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco – A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers, (c) 1952, pp. 207-208.

Doctrine
It is possible to know all about doctrine and yet not know Jesus. The soul is in danger when knowledge of doctrine outsteps intimate touch Jesus. August 16th – Oswald Chambers

“Niceness – wholesome, integrated personality – is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up ‘nice;’ just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat. But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world – and might even be more difficult to save.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco – A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers, (c) 1952,

Know the Lord???
“For the biblical writers, to “know the Lord” is not a matter of intellectual contemplation or mystical union; it is a matter of doing justice and mercy in concrete situations.”

Newbigin, Lesslie The Open Secret – An Introduction to the Theology of Mission – William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI Ó Copyright 1978, 1995 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., p. 97.

“In tens of thousands of heartbreaking ways, the secret message of Christ has been mocked by the behavior of those who bear His name. This is why we must ask ourselves the hard questions.“[i]