I had a dream about you. I said green was blue and yellow, and you said green was yellow and blue. You were like that with everything I said, taking the exact opposite stance, yet completely agreeing with me. That’s how I knew you loved me.
Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.
Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of human life appeared on this small, wildly atypical planet.
Those two little words -- says you -- are the most powerful argument in any discipline: theology, philosphy, even domestic harmony. They are powerful because they are true. Whenever you say something, it is you who says it. You. And what do you know?
It is impossible to describe a landscape so validly as to exclude all other descriptions, for no one can see the landscape in all its aspects at the same time, and no single view can prevent the existence and validity of other equally possible views.
And as I looked at the star, I realised what millions of other people have realised when looking at stars. We’re tiny. We don’t matter. We’re here for a second and then gone the next. We’re a sneeze in the life of the universe.
...I had been with my father so constantly for so long that I knew less and less about him with every passing year. Every meaningful image was jumbled together with the countless moments of our daily life defeating my efforts to gain some perspective.
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
Like it! Yes—the way I'd like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won't be rich, and I won't live in them cussed smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and I'll stick to 'em, too.
The only people who really think they have seen something new are those whose experience is limited or whose vision can't penetrate beneath the surface of things. Because something is recent, they think it is new; they mistake now the for originality.
The willingness to reexamine lifelong beliefs because of conflicting data takes enormous courage, and contrasts sharply with recent examples of public discourse in which our political, cultural, and religious leaders have fit data to preconceived theories.
I say this to myself alone: when you feel crushed, those around you look broken. When you glow, darkness turns to black light. If you hurt, even the comforts you are offered wound you. As you prosper, your failures prove to be just the right thing, perfect.
It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.
I am a rebel! But I don’t want people to agree with my views, because if everyone agreed with me then I wouldn’t be rebellious anymore. Did you hear what I heard? Because I heard what I said. Hear what I mean, which is not necessarily what I say.
As missional leaders we need to see God as:Bigger than the problems we endure.Bigger than the pressures we experience.Bigger than the people who criticize us.Bigger than the pain we suffer.Bigger than the praise we receive.Bigger than the pride in our hearts.
