Wrestling With Angels

Today I give you things that really stood out to me, made me think, challenged me, etc from Wrestling With Angels: Adventures in Faith and Doubt by Carolyn Arends. Compliments of my good buddy Storm, by the way.

referring to God's people in the Old Testament:
"They dream big, the fall far, they learn the hard way that God is larger than they are and they can't out-sin His grace (try as they might)."

"Imagine that. God names not just Jacob, but His people, His nation, His church: Israel. God wrestlers...So much of my struggle has been about the struggle itself, feeling that faith should be easier, that encountering God should be a walk in the garden, not ten rounds in the ring. I've always known I was supposed to be a God believer, a God follower, a God lover, even a God pro claimer, But I did not know I could be - should be - a God wrestler."

"All the grandiose and mundane and silly things that happen to us, the wonderful little epiphanies and the ugly little thoughts that cross our minds and change our hearts, the times when nothing much seems to happen at all except that we are sitting around becoming who we are - it all matters. And so, when we gather around campfires and kitchen tables and begin, "Have I ever told you about the time..." we engage in a profoundly human activity. We acknowledge our connection to each other. We learn to listen to the meaning encoded in the happenings of our lives."

"I can't help but think that all the realists who keep insisting that life is no walk in the park, have just never found the right park."

"Prayer is the point of access, the place where the finite and the infinite intersect and converse. To pray is to enter at least a little way into the Mystery, or - and this is even more dangerous - to invite the Mystery to come to you."

"Like flowers breaking through the sidewalk cement, our souls endure under the greatest adversity - Forget-Me-Nots stubbornly blooming even in the cracks of our brokenness."

and some quotes:
"Every happening, great or small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message." - Malcolm Muggeridge

"My idea of God us not a Divine Idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. he is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of Hos presence?" - CS Lewis