Quotes About Meaning

Whatever those things are that make you feel fully alive and like the universe is ultimately a good place and you are not alone, I need a faith that doesn't deny these moments but embraces them.

When people stepped forward and said, "You have heard it interpreted this way, but I tell you it really means this," it was progressive for their day. They were making new claims about what it means to be true to the Bible. What is accepted today as tradition was at one point in time a break from tradition.

What's the Best Question to Ask When You're Reading the Bible? Why did people find this important to write down?...Why did people write this down? What was going on in their world that this was important to them? Why did they feel the need to put words to this? Start with that question. Start with those questions. And see what happens.

He heard something? That's the best the writer can do? That's so vague. Ambiguous. Fuzzy. Exactly. Sometimes the most powerful truths in a story are the ones that are never explicitly stated.

The Japanese have a word for what gets you out of bed in the morning: they call it your ikigai. Your ikigai is that sense you have when you wake up that this day matters, that there are new experiences to be had, that you have work to do, a contribution to make. Sometimes this is referred to as your calling, other times your vocation, your destiny, your path. Your ikigai is your reason for being.

We create these identities around our roles and titles and job descriptions and achievements. They give our lives shape and form and meaning and definition. Ever so gradually over time our understanding of ourselves gets shaped by what we do and what we've done. We cling, we grasp, we hold tightly to these identities.

The one thing that unites the people I know who are on satisfying and meaningful paths is that they kept trying things, kept exploring, kept pursuing new opportunities, kept searching until they discovered their ikigai. And then from there they never stop figuring it out because they understand how absolutely crucial this is in creating a life worth living.

Embracing your ikigai will always require tremendous faith and courage.

Which takes us back to this creation poem, which grounds all creativity in the questions that are asked of all of us: What kind of world are we making? Which always leads to the pressing personal question: What kind of life am I creating?

I saw that there's no word for spiritual in the Hebrew scriptures (also called the Old Testament). So basic, and yet so revolutionary. There's no word for spiritual, because to call something spiritual would be to imply that other things aren't. In the Bible, everything is spiritual. All of life.

Now what? I realize now that those two words were forming a prayer. Now what? In a visceral way, prayer is naming what matters to you. Now what? is what mattered to me.

While boredom can be fairly subtle and cynicism can appear quite intelligent and even funny, despair is like a dull thud in the heart. Despair says, Nothing that we make matters.

What this particular religious system that I was working in did was ever so subtly divide the world up into two spheres Ã¢â'¬Â¦ the spiritual, and then the rest of life. As if spiritual is a dimension of life that some people have, and some don't. As if spiritual means less real than the stuff of everyday life like money and bodies and kids and houses and jobs. As if spiritual is about another time and another place when you die and leave this place.

So if that's it, if that's the point of it all, if that's the ticket, the center, the one unavoidable reality, the heart of the Christian faith, why is it that no one used the phrase until the last hundred years or so?

But maybe all of these questions are missing the point. Let's set aside all of the saying and doing and being and cutting holes in roofs and assume it's more simple than that. As some would say, "Just believe.

To say it again, eternal life is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of life lived now in connection to God.

So according to Jesus there is this age, this aion— the one they, and we, are living in— and then a coming age, also called "the world to come" or simply "eternal life.

Too many people have a job and they get a paycheck and that's it. Few things will inject more meaning and even, at times, joy into your work than you seeing yourself working your craft. Whatever it is you do all day, do you see it as a craft?

If a sermon can be resolved in the time it took to deliver it, then it missed something central to what a sermon even is, which is connected with what the Eucharist is.

Hank was full of absolutes, pronouncements like "Art has no utility" and "Warhol is irrelevant.

A hypereffective schedule designed to maximize productivity is, in fact, more likely to distract you from what's important than help you discover it.

Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.

Is this Paradise?' 'I can guarantee you that it isn't,' Jubal assured him. 'My taxes are due this week.

Sovereign, like love, means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between sober and sozzled.