Intro

• I never liked Jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing a saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
  After that I liked jazz music.
  Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. 
  I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened. 

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Problems

•  The greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. That's why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man's mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God. 

• The truth is, I drive completely different when there is a cop behind me than when there isn't. The soul of man, unwatched, is perverse. 

•  I started wondering if we had accomplished anything. I started wondering whether we could actually change the world. I mean we could = we could change our buying habits, elect socially conscious representatives and that sort of thing, but I honestly don't believe we will be solving the greater human conflict with our efforts. The problem is not a certain type of legislation or even a certain politician; the problem is the same that it has always been. 
  I am the problem. 

• I think every conscious person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality, has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group think, on human and authority and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within Christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest. 

• "All this flashy rhetoric about loving you. I never had a selfless thought since I was born. I am mercenary and self seeking through and through; I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn. Peace, reassurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek. I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin; I talk of love - a scholar's parrot may talk Greek - But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin." - CS lewis

• Have I even controlled my own heart? The overwhelming majority of time I spend thinking about myself, pleasing myself, reassuring myself, and when I am done there is nothing to spare for the needy. Six billion people live in this world, and I can only muster thoughts for one. Me. 

• I wondered how beautiful it might be to think of others as more important than myself. I wondered at how peaceful it might be not to be pestered by that childish voice that wants for pleasure and attention. I wondered what it would be like not to live in a house of mirrors, everywhere I go being reminded of myself. 

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Magic

• Story of how a group of Navy Seals charged into a house to find hostages nestled in a corner, shocked. They shouted at them to tell them they were Americans and here to rescue them but the hostages would not move. One of the Seals took a risk, put down his gun and took of his helmet. Squatted down and slowly inched close to the hostages until his body was touching some of theirs. He slowly told them they were Americans and here to rescue them. Slowly one hostage stood up to follow him and one after the other they all went out. 

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Shifts

• I learned that true love turns the other cheek, does not take a wrong into account, loves all people regardless of their indifference or hostility. The Christians at Reed seemed to me, well, revolutionary. I realize Christian beliefs are ancient, but I had never seen them applied so directly. The few Christians I met at Reed showed me that Christian spirituality was a reliable faith, both to the intellect and the spirit. 

• But it wasn't like that with Jesus. There were people He loved and people He got really mad at, and I kept identifying with the people He loved, which was really good, because they were all the broken people, the kind of people who are tired of life and want to be done with it, or they are desperate people, people who are outcasts or pagans. There were others, regular people, but He didn't play favourites at all, which is miraculous in itself. That fact alone may have been the most supernatural thing He did. He didn't show partiality, which every human does. 

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Faith

• "I dont exactly believe I need a God to forgive me of anything". 
  I know. Perhaps you can see it as an act of social justice. The entire world is falling apart because nobody will admit they ar wrong. But by asking God to forgive you, you are willing to own your own crap. 

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Redemption

• Ultimately we do what we love to do. I like to think that I do things for the right reasons, but I don't. Because of sin, because I am self-addicted, living in the wreckage of the fall, my body my heart and my affections are prone to love things that kill me. I found myself trying to love the right things without God's help and it was impossible. I tried to go one week without thinking a negative thought about another human being and I couldn't do it. Before I tried the experiment I thought I was a good human being but I realized I thought bad things about people all day long, my natural desire was to love darkness. 

• My answer to this dielmma was self-discipline. I figured I could just make myself do good things and think good thoughts about people. But that was no easier than waking up to a complete stranger and falling in love with them. Sooner or later my heart would testify to its true love: darkness. Then I would get up and try again. the cycle was dehumanizing. 

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Grace

• I love to give to charity but I don't want to be charity. This is why I have so much trouble with grace. 

• My friend candidly asked me to reveal my own struggles but I told him no, that my problems weren't that bad. "You are not above the charity of God." In that instant he revealed that my motives were not noble, they were prideful. It wasn't that I cared about my friends more than myself, it was that I believed I was above the grace of God. Who am I to think myself above God's charity? And why would I forsake the riches of God's righteousness for the dung of my own ego? 

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Gods

• I want you to understand one thing. God has never been nor ever will be invented. He is not a product of any sort of imagination. He does not obey trends. And God led us out of Egypt because you people cried out to Him. He was answering your prayers because He is a God of compassion. He could have left you to Satan. Don't complain about the way God answers your prayers. You are still living on an earth that is run by the devil. God has promised us a new land and we will get there.

• Your problem is not that God is not fulfilling, your problem is that you are spoiled. 

• God is not here to worship me, to mold Himself into something that will help me fulfill my level of comfort.

• I realized in an instant that I desired false gods because Jesus wouldn't jump through my hoops, and I realized my faith was about image and ego, not about practicing spirituality. 

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Belief

•  I don't believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? If I walk away from Him, and please pray that I never do, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything. 

• People hardly care what you believe, as long as you believe something. If you are passionate about something, people will follow you because they think you know something that they don't. 

• Dying for something is easy because it is associated with glory. Living for something. That's the hard thing because it extends beyond fashion, glory, or recognition. We live for what we believe. 

• If this is right, if I live what I believe, then I don't believe very many noble things. My life testifies that the first thing I believe is that I am the most important person in the world. My life testifies to this because I care more about my food and shelter and happiness than about anybody else. 

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Confession

• Rick wanted to love them simply because they were either hungry, thirsty or lonely. The human struggle bothered Rick as if something was broken in the world and we were supposed to hold our palms against the wound. He didn't see evangelism as a target on a wall in which the goal is to get people to agree with us about the meaning of life. It was beautiful because I had the same need: I mean I really knew I needed Jesus like I need water or food. Yet it was frightening because Christianity is so stupid to so much of our culture and I absolutely hate bothering people about this stuff. 

• Some of my friends who aren't Christians think that Christians are insistent and demanding and intruding, but that isn't the case. Most Christians have enormous respect for the space and freedom of others; it is only that they have found a joy in Jesus they want to share. 

• Sure, Christians had done terrible things to humanity, but I hadn't. I had never killed anybody at all. And those people weren't following Jesus when they committed those crimes against humanity. They were government people and government always uses God to manipulate the masses into following them. But that isn't Jesus' fault. 

• "Jesus said to feed the poor and to heal the sick. I have never done very much about that. Jesus said to love those who persecute me. I tend to lash out, especially if I feel threatened if my ego gets threatened. I know that was wrong and I know that a lot of people will not listen to the words of Christ because people like me, who know Him, carry our own agendas into the conversation rather than just relaying the message Christ wanted to get across." 

• I felt very strongly that Jesus was relevant in this place. I felt very strongly that if He was not relevant here then He was not relevant anywhere. 

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Romance

• I didn't want to get married right away, I think it will take me a while after I meet a girl. I like being single. I am one of the few who like it. I want to marry a girl who, when I am with her makes me feel alone. Someone whom I feel completely comfortable with, comfortable being myself. I can be very immature and awkward in moments, and I want to be able to be like that with her and not have her walk away or be embarrassed. 

• I fear intimacy. I fear what people will think of me. People really like me alot when they only know me a little, but I have this great fear that if they knew me alot they wouldn't like me. I am afraid of rejection and I am afraid that I won't feel the same way tomorrow and I have no faith in the system that God made. 

• I'm saying there is stuff that I can't tell her not because I don't want to but because there aren't words. There are places in our lives that only God can go. 

• I mean that to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can't accept who God is; a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people. That is why God tells us so many times to love each other. 

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What great gravity is this that drew my soul towards yours? 
What great force, that though I went falsely, went kicking, went disguising myself to earn your love,

also disguised, to earn your keeping, your resting, your staying, your will fleshed into mine,

rasped by a slowly revealed truth, the barter of my soul, the soul that I fear, the soul that I loathe, the soul that;

if you will love, I will love. I will redeem you, if you will redeem me?
Is this our prupose, you and I together to pacify each other, to lead each other toward the lie that we are good,

that we are noble, that we need not redemption, save the one that you and I invented of our own clay? 

I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.

I went looking, I wrote out a list, I drew an image, I bled a poem of you.

You were pretty, and my friends believed I was worthy of you.
You were clever, but I was smarter, perhaps the only one smarter, the only one able to lead you.

You see, love, I did not love you, I loved me. And you were only a tool that I used to fix myself, to fool myself, to redeem myself.

And though I have taught you to lay your lily hand in mine, I walk alone, for I cannot talk to you, lest you talk it back to me,

lest I believe that I am not worthy, not deserving, not redeemed. 

I want desperately for you to be my friend. But you are not my friend.

You have slid up warmly to the man I wanted to be, the man I pretended to be, and I was your Jesus and you were mine.

Should I show you who I am, we may crumble. 
I am not scared of you, my love. I am scared of me. 

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I want to be known and loved anyway. Can you do this?
I trust by your easy breathing that you are human like me, that you are fallen like me, that you are lonely, like me.

My love, do I know you? What is this great gravity that pulls us so painfully toward each other? Why do we not connect? 
Will we be forever in fleshing this out? And how will we with words, narrow words, come into the knowing of each other?
Is this God's way of meriting grace, of teaching us of the labryinth of His love for us, teaching us, in degrees that which He

is sacrificing to join ourselves to Him? Or better yet has He formed our being fractional so that we might conclude one great hope,

plodding and sighing and breathing into one another in such a great push that we might break through into the known and being loved,

only to cave into a greater perdition and fall down at His throne still begging for our acceptance? Begging for our completion?

We were fools to believe that we would redeem each other.

Were I some sleeping Adam, to wake up and find you resting at my rib, to share these things that God has done,

to walk you through the garden, to counsel your timid steps, your bewildered eye, your heart slow to love, so careful to love,

so sheepish that I stepped up my aim and became a man. Is this what God intended? That though He made you from my ribs,
it is you who is making me, humbling me, destroying me, and in so doing revealing Him.

Will we be in ashes before we are one? 
What great gravity is this that drew my heart toward yours? 
What great force collapsed my orbit, my lonesome state? What is this that wants in me the want in you?
Don't we go at each other with yielded eyes, with cumbered hands and feet, with clunky tongues? This deed is unattainable! 
We cannot know each other! 

I am quitting this thing, but not what you think. I am not going away.
I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer.
I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery,

save God's own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber

where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me. 

I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God.

I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love.
I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin on time 

before I am ended on this altar of dying and dying again. 

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God risked Himself on me, I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love and perhaps then,

and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us. 

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Alone

• Loneliness is something that happens to us, but I think it is something we can move ourselves out of. I think a person who is lonely should dig into a community, give himself to a community, humble himself before his friends, initiate community, teach people to care for each other, love each other. Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in front of our televisions. Loneliness is come thing that came with the fall. 

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Community

• Living in the community made me realize one of my faults: I was addicted to myself. All I thought about was myself. The only thing I really cared about was myself. I had very little concept of love, altruism, or sacrifice. I discovered that my mind is like a radio that picks up only one station, the one that plays me all the time. 

• Having had my way for too long, I became defensive about what I perceived as encroachments on my rights. My personal bubble was huge. I couldn't have conversations that lasted more than ten minutes. I wanted efficiency in personal interaction, and while listening to one of my housemates' talk, I wondered why they couldn't get to the point. 

• The most difficult lie that I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me. There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction. 

• Jesus spoke affirmation and love, and the tax collector sold his possessions and made amends to those he had robbed. It was the affection of Christ, not the brutality of a town that healed Zacchaeus. 

• If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus. 

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Money

• The thing about new things is you feel new when you buy them, you feel as though you are somebody different because you own something different. We are our possessions. 

• Ravi Zach said that the heart desires wonder and magic. He says technology is what man uses to supplant the desire for wonder. Ravi Zach says that what the heart is really longing for is worship, to stand in awe of a God we don't understand and can't fully xplain. 

• Money doesn't belong to me. Money is God's and He trusts us to dish it out fairly and with a strong degree of charity. 

• "That's God's money and He's gonna get it. I've never stolen a dime from God, and I'm never going to start."

• The fruit of obedience. By setting aside money from every check, you are trusting God to provide. He wants you to get over that fear - the fear of trusting Him. It is a scary place, but it is where you have to go as a follower of Christ. 

• The best part of tithing is what it has done for my relationship with God. Before, I felt like I was always going to God with my fingers crossed, the way a child feels around his father when he knows he has told terrible lies. God knew where I was, He didn't love me any differently when I was holding out on Him, it's just that I didn't feel clean around Him.   

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Worship

• There are many ideas within Christian spirituality that contradict the facts of reality. A statement like that offends some Christians because they believe if aspects of their faith do not obey the facts of reality, they are not true. But I think there are all sorts of things we believe that don't make sense to our heads. Love, for instance; we believe in love. Beauty. Jesus as God. 

• It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality, that it would contradict reason But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality, or it would not be reasonable. 

• Here is what I've started thinking: All the wonder of God happens right above our arithmetic and formula. The more I clumb outside my pat answers, the more invigorating the view, the more my heart enters into worship.  

• I think we have two choices in the face of such big beauty: terror or awe. And this is precisely why we attempt to chart God, because we want to be able to predict Him, to dissect Him, to carry Him around in our dog and pony show. We are too proud to feel awe and too fearful to feel terror. We reduce Him to math so we don't have to fear Him, and yet the Bible tells us fear is the appropriate response, that it is the beginning of wisdom. Does this mean God is going to hurt us? No. But I stood on the edge of the grand canyon once, behind a railing, and though I was never going to fall off the edge, I feared the thought of it. It is that big of a place, the wonderful of a landscape. 

• Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder. 

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Love (how to really love people)

• I was even more amazed when I realized I preferred, in fact, the company of the hippies to the company of Christians. It isn't that I didn't love my Christian friends or that they didn't love me, it was just that there was something different about my hippie friends; something, I don't know, more real, truer. I realize that is a provocative statement, But I only felt I could be myself around them, and I could not be myself with my Christian friends. 

• My Christian communities had always had little unwritten social ethics lie don't cuss and don't support Democrats and don't ask tough questions about the Bible. 

• The real issue in the Christian community was that it was conditional. You were loved, but if you had questions, questions about whether the Bible was true or whether America was a good country or whether last week's sermon was good, you were not so loved. By toeing the party line you earned social dollars; by being yourself you did not. If you wanted to be valued, you became a clone.  

• The pastors and leaders were wrong. The liberals were not evil, they were liberal for the same reason Christians were Christians because they believed their philosophies were right, good and beneficial for the world. 

• The problem with the Christian community was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in the Christian community, but it was conditional love. Sure, we called it unconditional but it wasn't. If people were bad, we treated them as though they were either evil or charity. If there were bad and rich, they were evil. If they were bad and poor, they were charity. Christianity was always right; looking down on everybody else And I hated this. I hated it with a passion. Everything told me it was wrong. It felt to me, as wrong as sin. 

• On the other hand, I felt by loving liberal people, I mean by really endorsing their existence, I was betraying the truth of God because I was encouraging them in their lives apart from God. I felt like there was this war going on between us, the Christians and them. I felt that by truly loving those people, I was helping them. I was giving joy to their life and that didn't feel right. It was a terrible place to be. How could I love my neighbor without endorsing what, I truly believed, was unhealthy spirituality? 

• What metaphors we think of when we consider the topic of cancer? we Battle cancer, Fight cancer, overwhelming majority of metaphors we listed were war metaphors. Many people who suffer from cancer feel more burdened than they should. If there were another metaphor, a metaphor more accurate, perhaps cancer would not prove so deadly. What about relationships? What metaphors do we use when we think of relationships? We Value people, Invest in people, people are Priceless,. All economic metaphors. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us and perhaps we feel they are priceless. This was the thing that had smelled rotten all these years. I used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did. But love doesn't work like money, it is not a commodity. When we barter with it, we all lose. 

• Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them. If a person senses that you do not like them, that you do not approve of their existence, then your religion and your political ideas will all seem wrong to them. 

• When I'm talking to someone there are always two conversations going on. First one is on the surface, the level of the mouths. The other is the level of the heart. 

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Jesus (the lines on his Face)

• I know our culture will sometimes understand a love for Jesus as weakness. There is this lie floating around that says I am supposed to be able to do life alone, without any help, without stopping to worship something bigger than myself. But I actually believe there is something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who had everything figured out. All great characters in stories are the ones who give their lives to something bigger than themselves. And in all the stories I don't find anyone more noble than Jesus. 

• Jesus didn't just love me out of principle; He didn't just love me because it was the right thing to do. Rather, there was something inside me that caused Him to love me. 

• Jazz music was invented by the first generation out of slavery. I thought that was beautiful because,, while it is music it is very hard to put on paper; it is so much more a language of the soul. It is as if the soul is saying something, something about freedom. I think Christian spirituality is like jazz music. Loving Jesus is something you feel. I think it is something very difficult to get on paper but is no less real, no less meaningful, no less beautiful. The first generation out of slavery invented jazz music. It is music birthed out of freedom. And that is the closest thing I know to Christian spirituality. A music birthed out of freedom. Everybody sings their song the way they feel it, everybody closes their eyes and lifts up their hands. 

• But what song will you sing when your soul gets set free? I think it will be something true and beautiful.