of love presently and past

Abba in heaven,

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without hope, faith, and love.

“One of the biggest mistakes we've made in the modern church is to reimagine spiritual maturity as the need to confess less. The unspoken assumption is, "As I ascend in relationship with God, I confess less because I have less to confess." True spiritual maturity, though, is the opposite. It's not an ascension; it's an archaeological dig as we discover layer after layer of what was in us all along. Spiritual maturity means more confession, not less. Maturity is discovering the depths to which God's grace has really penetrated, even without me knowing it.”

The good news is that you are loved—loved right now without qualification or restriction, loved unconditionally for who you are, loved in a way you can't lose. The bad news is that you find it very hard to believe that and even harder to experience it. Your instinct is, and will forever be, to try to drum up your own lovableness, to become lovable in some way you can define and control, to try to become in your own eyes what you already are in God's. The good news is called grace; the bad news is called sin.

Prayer flows from the posture of our hearts toward God, not from reaction to the world around us.

Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

We may romanticize ideas of "running after God" and "doing the Lord's work." But love is not rushed. If we are misguided by efficiency, external results, and doing more for God, we will leave love behind. God is in no hurry to save the world. And if we choose to partner with him, we partake in something larger than ourselves—a movement that spans millennia, governed by the pace of love.