Quotes about Surprising

Jesus made clear that the Kingdom of God is organic and not organizational. It grows like a seed and it works like leaven: secretly, invisibly, surprisingly, and irresistibly.

So also in culture. Infinite players understand that the vigor of a culture has to do with the variety of its sources, the differences within itself. The unique and the surprising are not suppressed in some persons for the strength of others. The genius in you stimulates the genius in me.

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.

The New Testament story is, in other words, one big act of wisdom—a response to God's surprising presence here and now.

But the Spirit was not limited to doing surprising and extraordinary things. He was present in the Old Testament period in giving civil rule and government ... moral virtues ... physical strength ... and intellectual abilities.

It is not at all surprising that the disciples imagined that the law had been abrogated, when Jesus made promises like this. For these promises reversed all popular notions of right and wrong, and pronounced a blessing on all that was accounted worthless.

Everything about her was so… delightfully unexpected. And he could listen to that drawl of hers all night.

God does not seek the people most outwardly capable, nor the most naturally "good." He works with the most unlikely material so that everyone can see the glory is his and his alone.

But taking love itself—God's kind of love—into the depths of our being through spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first.

Happiness recedes from those who pursue her." Happiness will come upon me unexpectedly as a by-product, a surprising bonus for something I have invested myself in. And, most likely, that investment will include pain. It is hard to imagine pleasure without it.

and the lizard can be caught in one’s hands, yet it is found in the palaces of kings.

Beyond any question, the way the American founders consistently linked faith and freedom, republicanism and religion, was not only deliberate and thoughtful, it was also surprising and anything but routine.