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61 " Every day struck with tsunami force, and only by running full speed did I think I could outwit the daily violence[...] But to run is eventually to run out of breath. Soon I realized that life was not ever going to slow for me -- that I would have to slow for it. Slowing, in fact, would be my only hope of living life, not simply surviving it. And so, in one of the most improbably seasons of my life, I started practicing sabbath, nudged toward the discipline of rest by Gordon Macdonald's book Ordering Your Private World. "If my private world is in order," writes MacDonald, "it will be because I have chosen to press Sabbath peace into the rush and routine of my daily life in order to find the rest God prescribed for himself and all of humanity." As the mother of three young children, I gave up, for one day of the week, the rush to get ahead. The alternative felt like death. "
― Jen Pollock Michel , Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home
62 " Here is the sole effort we must make: we must give grace as much access to our lives as possible. First, in some quiet pocket of our day, let’s immerse ourselves in the true and surprising story of God. Let’s wear out the bindings of our Bibles, irreverently spill coffee on their pages, and ask God to drive his words straight through the bone and marrow of our thinking and intending and desiring. Let’s turn to God with all the prayerful hope that his grace is sufficient to meet us in our wondering and wandering. With God’s help, let’s then put on new habits of being: honesty, sexual purity, generosity, courage, patience. Let’s take up the ancient disciplines of solitude and silence, prayer and fasting, worship and study, fellowship and confession, never thinking that God’s business is information but transformation. As there is failure, let us confess; as there is renewed intention, let us seek accountability and help. (We’re damned to think that a godly life is a solitary one.) Let’s join the great company of sinners and saints in a local congregation and commit together to put one foot in front of another every day for the glory of God. Here is the sole effort we must make: we must give grace as much access to our lives as possible. God is a speaking God—and we are meant to be his responsive people. All of it is grace. "
― Jen Pollock Michel , Surprised by Paradox: The Promise of And in an Either-Or World
63 " But it is also important to admit—better, to confess—that many of us choose busy as often as busy chooses us. "
― Jen Pollock Michel , A Habit Called Faith: 40 Days in the Bible to Find and Follow Jesus
64 " The Gospel writers record their eyewitness accounts of what the kingdom coming to earth really looks like. In the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, we see that our God has both spiritual and earthly preoccupations. Heaven mattered to Jesus, for sure, and proclaiming eternal salvation from sin was essential to Jesus’ message of the kingdom. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15). Jesus was insistent that sin was a very real problem, and because of sin, humans would be eternally separated from God apart from the divine work of atonement. But the stuff of earth mattered to Jesus too. In addition to his concern for the souls of men and women, Jesus also paid a good deal of attention to their bodies: hands that wouldn’t work, backs that wouldn’t straighten, legs that couldn’t walk. The kingdom advanced as Jesus healed physical infirmities and proclaimed forgiveness from sin, took interest in the poor and the poor in spirit. "
― Jen Pollock Michel , Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition & the Life of Faith
65 " there is so little of our own maturity and growth that we actually superintend. “I cannot transform myself, or anyone else for that matter. What I can do is create the conditions in which spiritual transformation can take place, by developing and maintaining a rhythm of spiritual practices that keep me open and available to God.”1 We give grace accessibility to our hearts when we engage in intentional spiritual practices. One important spiritual practice is the practice of confession. As Andy Crouch writes, As for Christians, well, we really have just one thing going for us. We have publicly declared . . . that we are desperately in need of Another to give us his righteousness, to complete us, to live in us. We have publicly and flagrantly abandoned the project of self-justification that is at the heart of every person’s compulsion to manage perceptions. . . . This means telling the world—before the world does its own investigative journalism—that we’re not as bad as they think sometimes. We’re worse. . . . If we’re being honest about our own beauty and brokenness, the beautiful broken One will make himself known to our neighbors.2 Confession allows us to be the worst of sinners and yet remain confident that God is committed to us still. Holy desire is best "
66 " Prayer is a means of bringing our authentic self to God and meeting him in these mysteries. We pray because we hope and believe that surrender can be forged there, on our knees. We pray because sometimes this is all we can do when desire and the undesirable have us knotted inside. We pray because, when the woods have gone dark, when the distance between God’s Word says it and I believe it feels like impossible terrain to travel and our only companions are doubt and fear, we need words as simple as these: Your will be done. "
67 " Prayer is the courageous act of bringing our authentic desires before God. Prayer is the place where, in Jesus’ name, we meet a holy God with all of our humanity hanging out. In our bravest moments of unscripted, unedited prayer, we find ourselves telling God what we want, how we’re afraid to want this, how we fear he’ll withhold, how we fail to trust and to worship and to reverence. We allow ourselves to see—and be seen. In this struggle, prayerful and raw, we willingly wait for the mercies of God to deliver us into the abiding belief that he is good. Prayer, bold and beautiful and brave, takes on the quality of our struggle to surrender to the God who is holy, to the God whose holiness produces our surprise. This kind of prayer is courageous because as we pray, we enter the throne room of God, just as Isaiah did in Isaiah 6. As happened to Isaiah, one glimpse of holiness can produce knee-knocking terror. “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (v. 5). The threads of Isaiah’s humanity unravel and fall into a clumsy, ugly heap. Standing painfully aware of the gap lying between human and holy, his own reflection in the mirror undoes him. This is the double vision of prayer: we see God and we see ourselves. "