Quotes from Rob Bell

Getting a paycheck for doing that thing you love may actually ruin it.

No, it's not. It's bigger and more expansive and inclusive and embracing and enlightened than that because the Jesus story is bigger and more expansive and inclusive and challenging and dangerous and enlightened than that.

There's a good chance your ikigai will change over time. Relax, this is normal.

To be here is to embrace the spiritual challenge of your ikigai, doing the hard work of figuring out who you are and what you have to give the world. This is work we all have to do, because we're all a piece of work, in the endless process of exploring our ikigai.

Embracing your ikigai will always require tremendous faith and courage.

New fuel is a particular kind of fuel. Whatever you're doing is exciting, novel, fresh—the details sparkle and shine. But new fuel quickly burns out. Beware of new fuel.

Exactly. It's about a particular kind of relationship with a particular kind of God, one who is good and kind and generous. One who can be trusted. One who keeps insisting, Trust me, I got this.

I believe the discussion itself is divine.

When Jesus tells the man that there are rewards for him, he's promising the man that receiving the peace of God now, finding gratitude for what he does have, and sharing it with those who need it will create in him all the more capacity for joy in the world to come.

Yes. Abraham is being invited to trust God, to believe that God is good and has his best interests in mind and will be faithful to him even if Abraham makes a mess of things.

This is why it's absolutely vital for you to embrace at the outset the idea that you are a divine piece of work, created to do good in the world. The universe is not neutral or, worse, against you. When you set out to find your path, the universe is on your side. That is the faith that keeps you going.

It's like I'm figuring it out, but as soon as I do, something shifts, and we get to figure it out all over again. I resist this endless figuring it all out, but over time, it starts to work a kind of magic on me.

But reading the Bible, you learn that it's not about trying to be something you're not—it's about learning to see the movement and motion and possibilities right in the midst of whatever world you find yourself in. We're not living in the first century or the ancient Near East—we're here, now. At this time. In this world.

I realize I've been living for years with the assumption that at some point you arrive. You get it all nailed down. You sort it all out. And then from there you get on with it.

Patience is Recovery of The Mind

I AM is less noun, more verb. Less a destination and more a direction.

He's alive in death, but in profound torment, because he's living with the realities of not properly dying the kind of death that actually leads a person into the only kind of life that's worth living.

The question, then, the art, the task, the search, the challenge, the invitation is for you and me to become more and more the kind of people who are aware of the divine presence, attuned to the ruach

It's possible to resist the very growth and change and expanding consciousness that God desires for you by appealing to your religious convictions.

You start with your 1, and then you suspend judgment on what you're doing, because you don't know what you have when you start. No one does.

Nerves are God's gift to you, reminding you that your life is not passing you by. Make friends with the butterflies.

Science does an excellent job of telling me why I don't have a tail, but it can't explain why I find that interesting.

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we've bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere

We're here on earth, in these bodies, feeling the pull of gravity, knowing that we're only here for a while. But then there are these moments— like brushes or glimpses— of love and connection and hope, and suddenly we're here, and we're everywhere. Our feet are on the ground, but we're flying. Our hearts are still beating, but our souls are soaring.