Quotes from Mark Buchanan

Mindset of the man too busy: I am too busy BEING God to become LIKE God.

God gave us laughter, I think, as a balm to wash the wounds of our own blunders, as a splint to mend the bones we break in our rashness or vanity.

Sabbath's golden rule: Cease from what is necessary. Embrace that which gives life.

Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest.

Sometimes doubting is not a lack of faith, but an expression of it. Sometimes to doubt is to merely insist that God be taken seriously not frivolously, to insist that our faith is placed in and upheld by something other than seeming conjuring tricks.

Unless and until we rest in God, we will never risk for God.

Mindset of the man too busy: I am too busy BEING God to become LIKE God.

One of the most convicting things I have recently come to realize about Jesus is that He was never, not once, in a hurry.

Physical sickness we usually defy. Soul sickness we often resign ourselves to.

Spiritual discipline: any activity I do by direct effort that will help me do what I cannot now do by direct effort.

Ironic that those most holy are least likely to see themselves that way.

Because we are what we love, our identity and our dignity depend on what we love and the depth and passion with which we love.

And then God gave me insight: this was winter. It would end, in time, but not by my own doing. My responsibility was simply to know the season, and match my actions and inactions to it. It was to learn the slow hard discipline of waiting. It was my season to believe in spite of—to believe in the absence of evidence or emotion, when there's nothing, no bud, no color, no light, no birdsong, to validate belief. It was my time to walk without sight.

Laughter—just good bone-shaking, belly-jiggling, light-in-the-head laughter, is a sure sign of health. The only one who hates it is Satan and all his wannabes.

The trees frothed with leaf and blossom. The ground softened to mud, then thickened with an embroidery of flowers. Birds whirled and swooped and sang, and colts and calves tottered or gamboled in farmyards. The back of winter finally broke, and warmth and color came rushing in. And hope. Always, hope.

This is the love of God, an alchemy that can turn enemies into children.

The Pharisees had an ethic of avoidance, and Jesus had an ethic of involvement.

We honestly think that we ourselves and those around us should be proficient with spiritual power, moving and acting with agility and endurance, wisdom and purity, able to conquer long-established habits of sloth and rebelliousness, simply on the basis of our desire and effort and sincerity...We have to train for the spiritual life.

Holy habits are that: the disciplines, the routines by which we stay alive and focused on Him. At first we choose them and carry them out; after a while they are part of who we are. And they carry us.

But grace and effort are not opposites. Grace and earning are opposites.

Sabbath-keeping requires two orientations. One is Godward. The other is timeward. To keep Sabbath well—as both a day and an attitude—we have to think clearly about God and freshly about time. We likely, at some level, need to change our minds about both. Unless we trust God's sovereignty, we won't dare risk Sabbath. And unless we receive time as abundance and gift, not as ration and burden, we'll never develop a capacity to savor Sabbath.

Love can't cover over the sins we cover up…If you want God and others to cover over your sin, stop covering it up.

Silence is the room we create for the searching of God, where we hear His voice and follow.

To worship is to ascribe to God things that are true about him until we actually believe that truth and live according to it.