Saturday, July 08, 2006

Of Books and Sports

I have a stack of library books to read and that pleases me to no end. That and it is Saturday which means there is Sports Saturday on CBC TV. Did you know I am the sports fanatic in our house? Dearest one often gets puzzled looks from co-workers when they ask him what I am up to on a Saturday while he is working. "Watching sports." is his typical reply. I can get so involved that I have learned to watch with the sound off so that the adrenalin of the sports casters doesn't make mine that much worse!

Here is a snippet from each of the books I have either recently read or am in the midst of reading.

"The way to find your thread again is to be still and remember who you are, to listen to your heart, your inner wisdom, as deeply as you can and then give yourself permission to follow it. If you can't give yourself this permission, then find someone who can. Everybody should have at least one permission giver in her life."
~ Sue Monk Kidd in The Dance of The Dissident Daughter

"He still had some doubts about the decision he had made. But he was able to understand one thing: making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision."

"We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand."
~ Paulo Coelho in The Alchemist

"Anything capable of decay is also capable of regeneration. Passion is a given when we are young. As children we burn with it, unless it gets smothered or beaten out of us. But as adults, it becomes so elusive, as if there were thin ribbony veils of music playing someplace just beyond our everyday hearing, pale and near-transparent. How do we evoke the untamable in ourselves, the part that dreams and imagines beyond what is known? How do we open fully to what life brings us, letting it lift us and carry us?"
~ Dawna Markova in I Will Not Die An Unlived Life

"As I left the bar, God convicted me about my proud addiction to morality and my attempt to look like a decent guy so that others would like me. I was so insecure that I feared not only my Christian friends would see walking out of a gay bar with queer cowboys but also that the queer cowboys would reject me for being a Bible thumper who, deep down, believed they were running headlong to hell in their cowboys boots. I care more about how I appeared to people than about whether I shared the passion of Jesus for those who are lost."
~Mark Driscoll in The Radical reformission

"One of the neighborhood kids who hangs out at our house all the time came up to me one day very upset because one of the bullies in his school was picking on him. I told him, "Rolando, that means you get to show him how friends treat each other. He must not know what love and friendship feel like, so you get to teach him," Rolando said, "Aww man, love is so hard."
~Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution

"The truth is you can both love your children and acknowledge you are disappointed in them or that they are not perfect. Similarly, you can say "I am or was a decent mother" and "My child is having difficulties." And as we will see later it may be a conceit to take too much responsiblity for our children. Your children are not a commodity for you to shape."~Barbara Moses in Dish: Midlife Women Tell the Truth about Work, Relationships,and the Rest of Life

"My life of prayer has always been stumbling and fitful, but has convinced me of some basic truths. We are in love. God is absolutely and always present, intimately active and involved with us, and endlessly good. As God's creations, we bear an essential part of God's own goodness in our hearts that can never be removed, not matter how selfish, predujiced, and vindictive we may be, no matter what we have done or what has been done to us."
~ Gerald May in The Awakened Heart

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