Home > Work > Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best

Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best QUOTES

Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best QUOTES

41 " We are so used to considering everything through the prism of our current feelings and our most recent acquisitions that it is a radical change to consider the vast before. But if we would live well, it is necessary. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best

42 " We fantasize an archaeological scoop. Meanwhile what we have right before us turns out to be far more useful—a theological probe. Instead of being told what Jeremiah’s parents were doing, we are told what his God was doing: “Before I shaped you in the womb, I knew all about you. Before you saw the light of day, I had holy plans for you: A prophet to the nations—that’s what I had in mind for you” (Jer 1:5). "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best

43 " MANASSEH WAS THE WORST KING the Hebrews ever had. He was a thoroughly bad man presiding over a totally corrupt government. He reigned in Jerusalem for fifty-five years, a dark and evil half century. He encouraged a pagan worship that involved whole communities in sexual orgies. He installed cult prostitutes at shrines throughout the countryside. He imported wizards and sorcerers who enslaved the people in superstitions and manipulated them with their magic. The man could not do enough evil. There seemed to be no end to his barbarous cruelties. His capacity for inventing new forms of evil seemed bottomless. His appetite for the sordid was insatiable. One day he placed his son on the altar in some black and terrible ritual of witchcraft and burned him as an offering (2 Kings 21). The great Solomonic temple in Jerusalem, resplendent in its holy simplicity, empty of any form of god so that the invisible God could be attended to in worship, swarmed with magicians and prostitutes. Idols shaped as beasts and monsters defiled the holy place. Lust and greed were deified. Murders were commonplace. Manasseh dragged the people into a mire far more stinking than anything the world had yet seen. The sacred historian’s judgment was blunt: “Manasseh led them off the beaten path into practices of evil even exceeding the evil of the pagan nations that GOD had earlier destroyed” (2 Kings 21:9).[2] "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best

44 " The terrible threat against life, he said in his book God Is Not Yet Dead, is not death, nor pain, nor any variation on the disasters that we so obsessively try to protect ourselves against with our social systems and personal stratagems. The terrible threat is “that we might die earlier than we really do die, before death has become a natural necessity. The real horror lies in just such a premature death, a death after which we go on living for many years.”6 "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best

45 " The terrible threat is “that we might die earlier than we really do die, before death has become a natural necessity. The real horror lies in just such a premature death, a death after which we go on living for many years. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best

46 " are still men, and not keyboards of pianos over which the hands of Nature may play at their own sweet will.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Letters from the Underworld "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best

47 " Judgment is not the last word; it is never the last word. Judgment is necessary because of centuries of hardheartedness; its proper work is to open our hearts to the reality beyond ourselves, to crack the carapace of self-sufficiency so that we can experience the inrushing grace of the healing, merciful, forgiving God. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best

48 " Are you going to live cautiously or courageously? I called you to live at your best, to pursue righteousness, to sustain a drive toward excellence. It is easier, I know, to be neurotic. It is easier to be parasitic. It is easier to relax in the embracing arms of The Average. Easier, but not better. Easier, but not more significant. Easier, but not more fulfilling. I called you to a life of purpose far beyond what you think yourself capable of living and promised you adequate strength to fulfill your destiny. "

― Eugene H. Peterson , Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best