Calling

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

With the drawing of this Love, and the Voice of this Calling, we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Here lies the tremendous mystery—that God should be all-powerful, yet refuse to coerce. He summons us to cooperation. We are honored in being given the opportunity to participate in his good deeds. Remember how He asked for help in performing his miracles: Fill the water pots, stretch out your hand, distribute the loaves.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.

All glory comes from daring to begin.

Charles Simeon, retired after fifty-four years of ministry, was still rising at 4:00 a.m. to read the Bible, pray, and spend time with God. A friend pleaded, “Mr. Simeon, do you not think that, now that you are retired, you might take things more easily?” “What?!” he replied. “Shall I not now run with all my might when the winning-post is in sight?”

Look, I'm just a singer. But in the end, I want to tear a little corner off the darkness.

Emotional even as I start reading this.  Not sure exactly why. Seems like my heart letting down it's guard in acknowledgment that I have pursued wrong things professionally for so long; maybe not so much pursuing wrong things as allowing .... I'm not actually sure right now.  I just know I'm not using the gifts Hod has given me for his kingdom.  Something is missing.  Something is wrong. Greek philosophy: pursuit of the Good, the True and the Beautiful Quote: Bono on his work for social justice: "Look, I'm just a singer. But in the end, I want to tear a little corner off the darkness." Deciphering DNA code is a process called sequencing. Quote: we are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we put in place of reality. - Daniel Boorstin    "home" 3/25/11 intro call Ever assignments in NYC? Disruptive to sit in? What do you do exactly? Worldview = the code? Define reality.     Send Keller sermon. Ought, is, can, will Fairy tales. Google.  Most influential institution.   What would it take for them to take our definition of reality seriously? Clockwork orange. Studs in the wall.  Hold the whole thing up but never advertise Can't solve Leslie newbiggen    Church of scotland missionary Fascinating story that explains reality Money.  Don't need our explanation so long as they can define their own reality Swift.  Can't reason a man out of something he never reasoned his way into Abolition of man. Show the fruit of the gospel, without calling it that.  Then you can explain where it came from when asked. Benchmark for success would be to sit on the board at Google 1.  Believe that gospel reality would make everything function better 2. Don't live this way. David brooks Diane vaugn.  Uncoupling Apply ourselves consciously to the work of renewal        Conscious destruction. Take and eat. Only renew by disruption

One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.

We're not free until we're bound to be free, until there's something that has a claim upon us other than our self, our aspirations, our psychological and intellectual and sexual tics and yearnings and desires for community.

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business , and turns into a racquet.

The road goes ever on and on; down from the door where it began.

In 1836, Charles Simeon retired after fifty-four years of ministry at the Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, UK. There he had been engaged in a ministry of expository preaching that had sent several generations of young Christian leaders out into British society. He had accomplished far more than 99.99% of ministers ever do. Yet a friend discovered that this elderly man was still rising at 4:00 a.m. every morning to light his own fire and to spend time reading the Bible, praying, repenting, and spending time with God. His friend thought this was over-kill. “Mr. Simeon,” he pleaded, “Do you not think that, now that you are retired, you might take things more easily?” “What?!” replied the old Charles Simeon, “Shall I not now run with all my might when the winning-post is in sight?”.

How does a kid from Coos Bay, with one leg longer than the other win races? All my life people have been telling me, 'You're too small Pre', 'You're not fast enough Pre', 'Give up your foolish dream Steve'. But they forgot something, I HAVE TO WIN.

A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to see and do new things.

I don’t want people who want to dance. I want people who have to dance

And the world being after all full of strange creatures beyond count, these little people seemed of very little importance. But in the days of Bilbo, and of Frodo his heir, they suddenly became, by no wish of their own, both important and renowned, and troubled the counsels of the Wise and the Great.

it went on, until his forties were running out, and his fiftieth birthday was drawing near: fifty was a number that he felt was somehow significant (or ominous); it was at any rate at that age that adventure had suddenly befallen Bilbo. Frodo began to feel restless, and the old paths seemed too well-trodden. He looked at maps, and wondered what lay beyond their edges: maps made in the Shire showed mostly white spaces beyond its borders. He took to wandering further afield and more often by himself; and Merry and his other friends watched him anxiously.

Shire! ‘Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.’

Why was I chosen?’ ‘Such questions cannot be answered,’ said Gandalf. ‘You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom, at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.’

‘And now,’ said the wizard, turning back to Frodo, ‘the decision lies with you. But I will always help you.’ He laid his hand on Frodo’s shoulder. ‘I will help you bear this burden, as long as it is yours to bear. But we must do something, soon. The Enemy is moving.’

‘But you cannot see very far,’ said Gandalf. ‘Neither can I. It may be your task to find the Cracks of Doom; but that quest may be for others: I do not know. At any rate you are not ready for that long road yet.’

‘Neither brave nor silly, I think. I could hardly help myself. I seemed to be drawn somehow.

Rivendell.’ ‘Have you often been to Rivendell?’ said Frodo. ‘I have,’ said Strider. ‘I dwelt there once, and still I return when I may. There my heart is; but it is not my fate to sit in peace, even in the fair house of Elrond.’

Frodo. ‘Yes, I, Gandalf the Grey,’ said the wizard solemnly. ‘There are many powers in the world, for good or for evil. Some are greater than I am. Against some I have not yet been measured. But my time is coming.

If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. That has been the task of my kindred, while the years have lengthened and the grass has grown.

‘The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.’ ‘Very well, very well, Master Elrond!’

A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken.

‘I will take the Ring,’ he said, ‘though I do not know the way.’

‘If I understand aright all that I have heard,’ he said, ‘I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will.

‘In the deep places of the world! And thither we are going against my wish. Who will lead us now in this deadly dark?’ ‘I will,’ said Gandalf, ‘and Gimli shall walk with me. Follow my staff

‘But when the great fall, the less must lead.

‘There is one who may claim it by right. For this assuredly is the palantír of Orthanc from the treasury of Elendil, set here by the Kings of Gondor. Now my hour draws near. I will take it.’ Gandalf looked at Aragorn, and then, to the surprise of the others, he lifted the covered Stone, and bowed as he presented it. ‘Receive it, lord!’ he said: ‘in earnest of other things that shall be given back. But if I may counsel you in the use of your own, do not use it –yet! Be wary!’

‘I don’t like anything here at all,’ said Frodo, ‘step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.’

I will say this: the rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?’

‘Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you.

The Bible presents sin by way of major concepts, principally lawlessness and faithlessness, expressed in an array of images: sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. Sin is blindness and deafness. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it —both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance: even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways. Sinful life, as Geoffrey Bromiley observes, is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life. CHAPTER 1 - Vandalism of Shalom

Spiritual hygiene includes ends like these —goals, purposes, primary intended consequences. The point of our lives is not to get smart or to get rich or even to get happy. The point is to discover God’s purposes for us and to make them our own. The point is to learn ways of loving God above all and our neighbor as ourselves and then to use these loves the way a golfer uses certain checkpoints to set up for a drive. The point is to be lined up right, to seek first the kingdom of God (Matt. 6: 33), to try above all to increase the net amount of shalom in the world.

The point is to be lined up right, to seek first the kingdom of God (Matt. 6: 33), to try above all to increase the net amount of shalom in the world. CHAPTER 3 - Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration

Ultimately, the only human beings we know are people who have been created to please God and build shalom but who, to a greater or lesser degree, mysteriously live against the purpose of their existence.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

Man is a mystery. If you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.