Quotes about Action

We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.

When we ask God to move a mountain, God may give us a shovel.

God comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.

When i ask God why all of these injustices are allowed to exist in the world, i can feel the Spirit whisper to me, 'you tell me why we allow this to happen. You are my body, my hands, my feet.

Something mystical can happen in the course of acting together that transcends words and ideologies—people who do not agree on ideas can create common ground in the act of loving.

Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, wrote, "Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion is to look out to the world; yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good; yours are the hands with which God is to bless people now.

When our theology gets in the way of loving our neighbors, it's time to rethink our theology.

Lord, remind us that it is not always agitated uprisings and nonstop activity which lead to justice, but that change often comes through the quietcommitment of a small group of people. Help us raise our small body of people to set about quietly becoming the change we want to see in the world. Amen.

this: for some strange reason, God doesn't want to change the world without us. There are times when we throw our hands up at God and say, "Do something!" and if we listen closely, we can hear God respond, "I did do something. I made you." Sometimes we are waiting on God, and God is waiting on us. When

I'm just not convinced that Jesus is going to say, "When I was hungry, you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me," or, "When I was naked, you donated clothes to the Salvation Army and they clothed me." Jesus is not seeking distant acts of charity. He seeks concrete acts of love: "you fed me…you visited me in prison…you welcomed me into your home…you clothed me.

Being a Christian is about choosing Jesus and deciding to do something incredibly daring with your life.

Being in proximity makes a difference. Relationships make issues real and complicated and personal. Relationships move us from ideology to compassion. We can't love our neighbor if we don't know them. And once we are proximate, love requires us to take action, to stand up for life in tangible ways.