Quotes about Understanding

The cliché is true: People don't care what we know until they know we care.

Emphasize reconciliation, not resolution.

We must remember that it was God who chose to give us different personalities, backgrounds, races, and preferences, so we should value and enjoy those differences, not merely tolerate them. God wants unity, not uniformity. But for unity's sake we must never let differences divide us. We must stay focused on what matters most — learning to love each other as Christ has loved us

Whatever we say about God always rests within the larger reality of what we can't say; meaning always resides within a larger mystery; knowing always takes place within unknowing; whatever has been revealed to us surrounded by that which hasn't been revealed to us.

When the gospel is understood primarily in terms of entrance rather than joyous participation, it can actually serve to cut people off from the explosive, liberating experience of the God who is an endless giving circle of joy and creativity.

If there is a divine being who made everything, including us, what would our experiences with this being look like? The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, then we are in control. And so in passage after passage, we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more.

He writes to his friends in Ephesus: I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened. When people ask you what the Bible is about, do you answer: It's about becoming more enlightened? Because that's how Paul puts it.

Jesus responds to almost every question he's asked with...a question. What do you think? How do you read it? he asks, again and again and again.

But this lawyer, he can't even answer Jesus's question by saying the name. He simply replies the one . . . That's your neighbor. That's who you're called to love. That's where the eternal life is found. In showing kindness to the one you hate, the one you despise, the one you wish didn't exist, the one whose name you can't even say.

When you're fighting, it's absolutely crucial to keep remembering that they're trying to figure it out just like you are.

When people charge in with great insistence that this is God's word all the while neglecting the very real humanity of these books, they can inadvertently rob these writings of their sacred power. All because of starting in the wrong place. You start with the human. You ask those questions, you enter there, you direct your energies to understanding why these people wrote these books. Because whatever divine you find in it, you find the divine through and in the human, not around it.

To fully appreciate the Bible, you have to let it be what it is.