Quotes about Perception

Philip Yancey sees our blasé attitude toward the faithfulness of God in the waitstaff At Yellowstone. Even when they are finished their chores, they don't look up and marvel at the geiser going off. After all, they see it so often.

Can we live now "as if" God is loving, gracious, merciful, and all-powerful, even while the blinders of time are obscuring our vision? The

As Dennis Covington has written, Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend. 7-20

God is already present, in the most unexpected places. We just need to make God visible.

My feelings of God's presence — or God's absence — are not the presence or the absence.

Modern humanity does not perceive the world as worth God dying for. We Christians must demonstrate it.

One reason the broader world does not look to Christianity for guidance is that we Christians have not spoken with a credible voice.

Jimmy Carter taught a Sunday school class throughout his presidency, winning the grudging respect of reporters who had once questioned his religious talk as a political ploy. Even so, he lost many Christians' votes to Ronald Reagan, the only U.S. president to have been divorced and who rarely attended church and gave little to charity, mainly because Reagan supported many of the favorite causes of the religious Right.

and said, almost without thinking, "Well, of course, Philip, God was already present in the prison. I just had to make him visible." I have often thought of that line from Joanna, which would make a fine mission statement for all of us seeking to know and follow God. God is already present, in the most unexpected places. We just need to make God visible.

The reason we fear to go out after dark is not that we may be set upon by bands of evangelicals and forced to read the New Testament, but that we may be set upon by gangs of feral young people who have been taught that nothing is superior to their own needs or feelings.

H. L. Mencken described a Puritan as a person with a haunting fear that someone, somewhere is happy; today, many people would apply the same caricature to evangelicals or fundamentalists.

Legalism is a subtle danger because no one thinks of himself as a legalist.