Quotes about Life

That's why the Bible is not a book about going to heaven. The action is here. The life is here. The point is here. It's a library of books about the healing and restoring and reconciling and renewing of this world. Our home.

For Jesus, the question wasn't, "How do I get into heaven?" but "How do I bring heaven here?

Nerves are God's gift to you, reminding you that your life is not passing you by, Make friend with the butterflies. Welcome them when they come, revel in them, enjoy them, and if they go away, do whatever it takes to put yourself in a position where they return. Better to have a stomach full of butterflies than to feel like life is passing you by.

Whatever those things are that make you feel fully alive and like the universe is ultimately a good place and you are not alone, I need a faith that doesn't deny these moments but embraces them.

Are you breathing? Are you here? Did you just take a breath? Are you about to take another? Do you have a habit of regularly doing this? Gift. Gift. Gift. Whatever else has happened in your life—failure, pain, heartache, abuse, loss—the first thing that can be said about you is that you have received a gift. Often

No one has ever done this before. No one has ever been you before. This exact interrelated web of people and events and places and memories and desire and love that is your life hasn't ever existed in the history of the Universe. Welcome to a truly unique phenomenon. Welcome to your life. I want you to be here. Welcome to here.

all of life matters, all work is holy, all moments sacred, all encounters with others encounters with the divine.

There are those, like the church websites quoted at the beginning of this chapter, who put it quite clearly: "We get one life to choose heaven or hell, and once we die, that's it. One or the other, forever." God in the end doesn't get what God wants, it's declared, because some will turn, repent, and believe, and others won't.

This is a book about seeing, about becoming more and more alive and aware, orienting ourselves around the God who I believe is the ground of our being, the electricity that lights up the whole house, the transcendent presence in our tastes, sights, and sensations of the depth and dimension and fullness of life, from joy to agony to everything else.

There is an energy in the world, a spark, an electricity that everything is plugged into. The Greeks called it zoe, the mystics call it "Spirit," and Obi-Wan called it "the Force.

When you say "yes" to your life and your path and your work in the world, you are entering into this mystery of creation, a mystery in which everybody starts with a blank page, and "everybody" includes you. Now, let's pause and take a breath. You've been given this gift of life. You were not given his gift or her gift. You were given your gift.

He's alive in death, but in profound torment, because he's living with the realities of not properly dying the kind of death that actually leads a person into the only kind of life that's worth living.