December
"Then peeled the bells more loud and deep:
'God is not dead: nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “I heard the bells on Christmas Day”
November
“If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.”
Sojourner Truth
October
“Nobody escapes being wounded. We all are wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.”
Henri Nouwen
September
“We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”
Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
August
“We are all missionaries. We carry our religion with us, or we allow our religion to carry us. Wherever we go, we either bring people nearer to Christ, or we repel them from Christ.”
Eric Liddell, quoted in McCasland, Eric Liddell: Pure Gold: A New Biography of the Olympic Champion Who Inspired Chariots of Fire
July
“She was created in the image of God! How can anyone dare slander the vessel that bears such noble imprint?… And if anyone says that it was a woman, Lady Eve, who caused man’s fall from Paradise, I would say that man gained more through Mary than he lost through Eve.”
Christine de Pizan (1364-1430)
June
“The deepest reality of life in the Spirit depicted in the Book of Acts is that the disciples of Jesus rarely, if ever, go where they want to go or to whom they would want to go. Indeed the Spirit seems to always be pressing the disciples to go to those to whom they would in fact strongly prefer never to share space, or a meal, and definitely not life together. Yet it is precisely this prodding to be boundary-crossing and border-transgressing that marks the presence of the Spirit of God.“
Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible
May
“A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar who has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.“
C. S. Lewis
April
“God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.“
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
March
“A man who walks with God can never erase the sight of human need from his heart. He must act or forever shut his eyes. He cannot see and then be at ease. Vision carries with it a great obligation.“
David Wilkerson