Quotes from Eugene H. Peterson

Every day I review the ways he works, I try not to miss a trick. I feel put back together, and I'm watching my step. GOD rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.

If vocational holiness is to be anything more than a pious wish, pastors must dive to the ocean depths of prayer.

I am busy because I am lazy. I indolently let others decide what I will do instead of resolutely deciding myself. It was a favorite theme of C. S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us.

The church is never in so much danger as when it is popular and millions of people are saying "I'm born again, born again, born again.

That is Jeremiah's accusation: "You have found a safe place, haven't you! This nice, clean temple. You spend all week out in the world doing what you want to do, taking advantage of others, exploiting the weak, cursing the person who isn't pliable to your plans, and then you repair to this place where everything is in order and protected and right.

I didn't want to be a religious professional whose identity was institutionalized. I didn't want to be a pastor whose sense of worth derived from whether people affirmed or ignored me. In short, I didn't want to be a pastor in the ways that were most in evidence and most rewarded in the American consumerist and celebrity culture.

So watch your step. Use your head. Make the most of every chance you get. These are desperate times! 17 Don't live carelessly, unthinkingly. Make sure you understand what the Master wants. 18-20 Don't drink too much wine. That cheapens your life. Drink the Spirit of God, huge draughts of him. Sing hymns instead of drinking songs! Sing songs from your heart to Christ. Sing praises over everything, any excuse for a song to God the Father in the name of our Master, Jesus Christ.

I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields, and to sing of its passing while it waits. The

Priest and wise man and prophet alike felt that their professional well-being was threatened by Jeremiah's singularity. Panicked, they plotted his disgrace. Their "law" and "counsel" and "words" were in danger of being exposed as pious frauds by Jeremiah's honest and passionate life.

We do not become less needy, less dependent when we pray; we become more needy, more dependent, which is to say, more human.

In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; to God than to my clamoring ego.

Soul" is a barrier against reduction, against human life reduced to biology and genitals, culture and utility, race and ethnicity. It signals an interiority that permeates all exteriority, an invisibility that everywhere inhabits visibility. "Soul" carries with it resonances of God-created, God-sustained, and God-blessed. It is our most comprehensive term for designating the core being of men and women.

Neither explaining suffering nor offering a program for the elimination of suffering, Lamentations keeps company with the extensive biblical witness that gives dignity to suffering by insisting that God enters our suffering and is companion to our suffering.

The kingdom of self is heavily defended territory. Post-Eden

There is an enormous gap between what we think we can do and what God calls us to do.

the primary practice of language is not in giving out information but being in relationship.

Thomas Merton wrote, "it is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not 'what he ought to be.' If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we will do away with him altogether."50

Real life, the real world, is a vast theater of salvation, directed by our wise and totally involved God.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't be complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us.

So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It's your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.

Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God—it whets our appetite. Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship—it deepens.

We do not qualify as biblical simply by quoting the Bible. We are biblical only when we share life in the wilderness with those who are tempted and fall, when we carry the cross of Jesus, and when we love extravagantly in Jesus's name.

The Holy Spirit's instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are NOT His instruments. Nathaniel Hawthorne

Talking to God, I felt, is always better than talking about God; those pious conversations—there's always a touch of self-approval about them. THERESE OF LISIEUX[1] I