"Sometimes you have to serve in order to lead. I hope you'll understand that one day." --Odysseus, TROY

"War is young men dying and old men talking. You know this. Ignore the politics." --Odysseus, TROY

"Oh, how i want to be an offense...an unsettling presence in this life." --Stavesacre

"Trace the shape of my heart till it becomes more familiar to Your eyes." --Jars of Clay

"we're sort of like 7-11. we're not always doin business, but we're always open."
"we must all fear evil men. but there is another evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men." --Boondock Saints

"what direction, what direction? life begins at the intersection."
"every lament is a love song. i still can't believe you're gone."--Switchfoot

"I'm an artist. Torture is a pre-requisite." -Dawson

"We're all about going for the big booty adventures." -Mike Bedient

"Being a Christian is about engaging the mind and heart more and more, not shutting them off or letting someone else think for you." Rob Bell

"(The Christian Life) is like driving at night. You can only see as far as the headlights reach, but you can make the whole trip that way." -orig. photo lecture. altered

Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls. 1 peter 1:8-9

for in this world you will have trouble. but take heart! i have overcome the world!
-john 16:33

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." -Nelson Mandela

But Gideon told them, "I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. The LORD will rule over you." Judges 8:23

"A diminished view of God is the price you pay for your comfort" -Eugene Peterson

I cannot be awake,
For nothing looks to me as it did before.
Or else i am awake for the very first time,
And all else has been a mean sleep. -WW

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. 1 Cor. 15:10

whenever i'm about to do something, i ask myself, "would an idiot do that thing?" if i think they would, i do not do that thing. -dwight

"I thought football season was over." "Office football has no season." --brothers and sisters

"I am sure that earthly values are different to heavenly ones. I believe that the joy among the angels of God is as great when a subnormal person is saved as when a V.I.P. gives his heart and life to the Lord. Possibly greater. One cannot tell." --Corrie ten Boom

"Kareltje was a little boy twelve years old. He had blue eyes and curly hair. He was one of a large, poor family, and his father was cruel to him because Kareltje was feeble-minded. He listened as I told the story of the disciples giving food to five thousand people. As the five loaves and two fishes passed from Jesus' hand to theirs, the bread and fish became sufficient to feed the multitude.
Suddenly Kareltje jumped up, and swinging his arms around him, cried, "There is enough! There is plenty, plenty for everyone! Just take, take as much as you like. There is enough. There is plenty!"
I wished every child of God rejoiced as Kareltje did about the plenty that we have, when taking all from Jesus' hands and passing on to others." --Corrie ten Boom

"But being misunderstood can have much more interesting results if it's worked and massaged and kneaded and tossed around and pounded again. I like the malleability of chaos sometimes. And it's even better if you allow for the reality that "spirituality" and "polite" aren't necessarily one and the same." --Brent McKinney

"Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief."
"But unless she is proceeding at sixty seconds a minute along this same timeline that all we living people travel by, what does 'now' mean?"
"[Those somethings] appear as two circles (circles are slices of spheres). Two circles that touched. But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are te very thing that I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me, 'She goes on.' But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back."
"The exact same thing is never taken away and given back."
--C.S. Lewis

"I want to build my spirituality and all He says is IT grows, becomes. You don't make it grow, and you don't make it become."
"What if we could be those kind of Kingdom people?"
"What would it be like to be the kind of Christ-followers that gave our lives away for that?"
"Let's not just clean it up, but let's make it beautiful."
"I want you to not get to heaven and ask the question, 'Are we there yet?' I want you to have lived the life in this community where you've tasted it and touched it and felt it, and were part of it all the time."
"We are people who practice the presence of the Kingdom all around us."
"My prayer is this: that each step of the way, what people notice about Jesus is not about [us], but it's about that He is alive and He is resurrected, and He COMES-with grace and mercy and love and beauty."
--Rick McKinley

"One man and Christ is a majority."

"So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God." --Hebrews 4:9

"But the planting process is a messy process. Most of us like a spirituality that we can show God how clean and sterile and pure and safe...but when you grow stuff, you grow it in dirt and death and decomposition."
"But what most Christian spirituality look slike is that we take the seeds of the Kingdom and scatter them around the dentist's office. In this sterile environment with bad music and it just doesn't smell very good, but we're just kind of like, 'yes! grow!' But there's nothing there to grow in! Cause we're all pretending that there's no chicken manure in our lives, and there's no real dirty place in our lives, it's just this nice place, this sterile place. And the thing about sterile environments is nothing grows. Nothing bad grows, but nothing good grows either. And Jesus is saying when something gets planted it gets planted in the nasty places of your life."
--Rick McKinley

"Therefore, behold, I will allure her, bring her into the wilderness and speak kindly to her. Then I will give her her vineyards from there, and the valley of Achor as a door of hope. And she will sing there as in the days of her youth, as in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt. It will come about in that day,' declares the Lord, 'that you will call me Ishi and no longer call me Baali." --Hosea 2:14-16

"You are altogether beautiful, my darling, and there is no blemish in you." --Song of Solomon 4:7

"Put me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm. For love is as strong as death. Its ardor is as inflexible as Sheol; its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench love, nor will the rivers overflow it; if a man were to give all the riches of his house for love, it would be utterly despised." --SS 8:6-7

"When in our whole lives did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith?" --C.S. Lewis

"We were afraid of crude salvationism, afraid of a breach with the spirit of the age, afraid of ridicule, afraid (above all) of real spiritual fears and hopes." --C.S. Lewis

"Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?" -C.S. Lewis

"I never told her she was perfect. And she was perfect every day." --Liam Neeson, "Love Actually"

"joy is love exultant, peace is love in repose, and long suffering is love enduring. It is all love, you see, a gentleness is love in society, and goodness is love in action, and faith is love on the battle-field, and meekness is love at school, and temperance is love in training."
"Now let us hold the truth, but let us hold it in love."
--D.L. Moody

"The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world. In their effort to achieve restful "adjustment" to unregenerate society they have lost their pilgrim character and become an essential part of the very moral order against which they are sent to protest. The world recognizes them and accepts them for what they are. And this is the saddest thing that can be said about them. They are not lonely, but neither are they saints." --A.W. Tozer

"Always remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross." --A.W. Tozer

"Whatever a dreamy idealism may say, we are forced to deal with things down on the level of practical reality. If when we come to prayer our hearts feel dull and unspiritual, we should not try to argue ourselves out of it. Rather, we should admit it frankly and pray our way through. Some Christians smile at the thought of "praying through," but something of the same idea is found in the writings of practically every great praying saint from Daniel to the present day. We cannot afford to stop praying till we have actually prayed." --A.W. Tozer

"keep on with allowing life to be lead by the living.
hummm - i'm thinkin' He doesn't require grad school to share His love..."
--Robyn Eubanks

"But the most valuable things you'll get from Him are the reality that the abundant life mentioned in the Gospel is best shared life-on-life and that seeing potential in teenagers is crucial."
"Just remember that when you work with teenagers later that a high schooler can be in love and what it means to take their trials and tribulations seriously."
"You'll blow it enough to make you realize you can't really fight temptation on your own. But don't be too hard on yourself about that because it'll teach you an awful lot about God's mercy and grace and forgiveness...and a big fat dose of humility. They'll also teach you to value relationships and friendships outside the church because it'll provide a backdrop against which you can see the works of Christ in your own life...and to get to know people and try to understand them...to love everybody, whether or not their theology lines up with yours."
"the big events and people are all in there. They will help you figure out who you are in light of who Christ wants you to be by exposing the cracks in your character and showing you how decietfully wicked your heart is...and then Christ will spackle them and make them better than new. Just know that you aren't in a position to make deals with the God of the Universe. He calls all the shots, kid."
"Wisdom is knowing what time it is."
"Our lives are outward manifestations of inward realities."
--Brent McKinney

(yeah. brent, thanks for those.)