#ortberg

Review of The Merry Spinster: Sinister and Surreal Fairy Tales

... for better or worse we are shaped more by people than any other force in life. In the same way, more than anything else, God uses people to heal people.

.... I often think that what I need in order to be free of anxiety is a guaranteed outcome. But I'm wrong. It's not what's on the other side of the door that gives me confidence to go through; it's the one who goes with me.

The divine “go” comes into every life, but we must be willing to leave before we’re willing to go.

For every kind of power human beings have access to, we find a way to use it with great destructiveness. It's true for verbal power, financial power, political power, nuclear power. Imagine that in prayer we had access to supernatural power that would always make things happen the way we wanted them to happen. It would be a disaster.

Jonah had money enough to buy passage for a long voyage out of his pocket. He had mobility; he had options. Here's one of the dangerous things about money: having money makes it easier for us to think we can run away from God, because we've got options. Sometimes it's hard for a prophet and a profit to coexist.

The church is always at its best when it goes into the world humbly, like sheep among wolves. Ironically, a few centuries after Jesus, when the church did get some political and financial power, it lost much of its spiritual power.