Starbucks "The Way I See it" quote #26

Hmm...

I have a hard time thinking about "today" let alone "yesterday". I get that "today" is important... it's something that I always have to work at doing... but "yesterday"? What's the point? Who cares what happened yesterday. Looking back too much can get you into trouble. Biblically... looking back rarely results in good things. Ask Mrs Lot!

God even gives us the gift of prophesy to be able to see into the future. I don't remember the gift of remembering. Even the end of Matthew 6 that tells us to focus on today... is so that we can focus on tomorrow... tomorrow.

It's never about what happened yesterday... thinking about going back... or staying put... or fighting for the stagnant. It's relaxing in the daily provision and letting go of our worries and preparing to do again tomorrow wherever that path leads.

Life's an adventure... not an insurance commercial.

"You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do."

Anne Lamott
Bird by Bird

We're watching a classmate of Jared's in the mornings and after school for a little while. I poked my head downstairs to ask how things were going a minute ago...

Dad: Hey kids... how are things going
Jared: Fine... I'm playing the drums and she's got a weird headache.

Weird eh? Can't imagine where that came from.

I'm quite often stunned and refreshed at the remarkably healthy view on Christianity Bono has. The more disheartening stories that I hear about Nashville and the "Christian Industry" the more I love those who have the courage to just be real and raw.

“Religion is what happens when the Holy Spirit leaves the room”

"I have this hunger in me...everywhere I look I see the evidence of a creator. But I don't see it as religion, which has cut Irish people in two. I don't see Jesus Christ as being in any part of a religion. Religion to me is almost like when God leaves - and people devise a set of rules to fill the space."

"I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep shit. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity."

Bob Hewson: "You do seem to have a relationship with God."
Bono: "Didn't you ever have one?"
Bob Hewson: "No."
Bono: "But you have been a Catholic for most of your life."
Bob Hewson: "Yeah, lots of people are Catholic. It was a one-way conversation... You seem to hear something back from the silence!"
Bono: "That's true, I do."
Bob Hewson: "How do you feel it?"
Bono: "I hear it in some sort of instinctive way, I feel a response to a prayer, or I feel led in a direction. Or if I'm studying the Scriptures, they become alive in an odd way, and they make sense to the moment I'm in, they're no longer a historical document."

"Coolness might help in your negotiation with people through the world, maybe, but it is impossible to meet God with sunglasses on. It is impossible to meet God without abandon, exposing yourself, being raw.. you don't know what's going on behind those glasses, but God, I can assure you, does."

"...but it really sank in: the Christmas story. The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw... a child ... I just thought: 'Wow!' Just the poetry... Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. I was just sitting there, and it's not that it hadn't struck me before, but tears came down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this."

"...this is course is at the heart of the idea of redemption: to begin again. This is at the heart of religious fundamentalism too: to be born again. I wish to begin again on a daily basis. To be born again every day is something that I try to do. And I'm deadly serious about that."

"But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross."

When you have a some time... check these You Tube clips out. It's an in depth interview between Bono and Bill Hybels. Really interesting perspective. Not a perfect dude. But that's kinda the point methinks.


Sources

It's like walking into a room with a sumo wrestler sitting on your head; reminding yourself that nothing on earth is as beautiful as God... Then feeling him shrink away into the sun.

I think there is only one thing that I would ever get a tattoo of. It's of the Isaiah 26:8 scripture that Passion takes their 268 Generation pledge from.

It would just say..

"I think that the time when music could change the world is past. I think it would be very naive to think that in this day and age. I think the world today is a different place, and that it's time for science and physics and spirituality to make a difference in this world and to try to save the planet.''

Neil Young

Still cool music. Not world changing but hey...

"I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid."

GK Chesterton