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41 " I've only recently understood that rest is not truly Sabbath if it depends on the labors of others who don't get to rest. "
― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith
42 " Sabbath rest is not a reward that God gave humanity for a productive week. The very first Sabbath day was also humans' first full day of existence. In other words, they hadn't done a thing. "
43 " She took crayons and made blackout poems out of the most hateful letters-there isn't just one way to turn the ugly into the beautiful. "
44 " I hope you'll feel deep within your heart and with every cell of your being that you are held and embraced by the God who made you, who redeemed you, and the God who accompanies you through every end and onward to every beginning. "
45 " Even on the days when I'm not sure I can believe it wholeheartedly, this is still the story I'm willing to be wrong about. "
46 " Wholehearted, vulnerable faith lives not in the mental citadel but on the open, windswept plains of the heart. And on that vast terrain, we are called first not to proclamation but, once again, to observation, to listening, and to love: “Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”3 Peter undoubtedly knew the words of the Shema by heart. "
47 " To live and to love [well] is not easy. If it were easy, if it came naturally, we wouldn't need that prayer "
48 " At its best, faith teaches us to take risks. "
49 " I don't believe God's vulnerability is some kind of cosmic kryptonite that serves to weaken the divine; rather, it is beauty, it is solidarity, and it is strength. "
50 " God does all of this without the guarantee of reciprocation. Divine love, like all love, is freely given and freely received. Even if God promises never to walk away, we can and we have, over and over. "
51 " I know that Christians are Easter people. We are supposed to favor the story of the resurrection, which reminds us that death is never the end of God's story. Yet I have never found that story even half as compelling as the story of the Incarnation. "
52 " [Wholehearted faith] gets complicated on the days when I'm not sure I believe in God—or at least any version of God like the one I grew up with. Even the word "allegiance" takes on a bitter tinge, loaded with cultural freight and political baggage. And the language of utter devotion is bedeviled by uncertainty and skepticism. "
53 " In the Protestant tradition, Mary has largely been diminished, as if her veneration would somehow take away from Jesus's glory. In the Roman Catholic sector of faith, she is sometimes so esteemed that we lose track of her humanity—and some people go so far as to claim that Mary experienced painless childbirth. "
54 " I am a Christian because, when all things went south and all signs pointed to failure and nearly all the men had abandoned Jesus after his arrest, it was women who stuck around. It was women who stood witness at the foot of the cross. "
55 " I have not managed to find a corner of it where grace cannot break through and where there is not enough spiritual oxygen for that grace to grow. "
56 " This image of reading the Bible as helping to construct a quilt, then crawling under it together, might shock those who have experienced Scripture as a bludgeon "
57 " I’m wondering whether Jesus’s greatest act of solidarity with humanity might have been to take on the long, slow walk toward death that is the reality for each and every person. Only he had the capacity to walk a little farther, empowered by divine love to continue on from the precincts of death into the realm of everlasting life. "
58 " Maybe we’re playing dead when we repeat the chords of that questionable worship song nine times—eight times too many—without ever analyzing critically what claims it makes about us or our God. Maybe we’re playing dead when we fail to consider, when we’re at a table or in a sanctuary, who’s not at that table or in that sanctuary—who isn’t welcome and why. "
59 " Prayer is a sacred space in which God invites us just to be—to be imperfect, to be messy, to be a ball of conflicting emotions, to be all of who we are this side of heaven. "
60 " I’m just as uncomfortable with uncertainty and emotional exposure as the next person, but I also know that just about every sociological study on the subject shows that meaningful connection requires risk and vulnerability, and you can’t argue with that data. "