Quotes About Lostness

There is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him.

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely.

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - not bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it any less lonely.

All we like sheep have gone astray.

Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes- in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sounds and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions.

Apathy is passionless living. It is sitting in front of the television night after night and living your life from one moment of entertainment to the next. It is the inability to be shocked into action by the steady-state lostness and suffering of the world. It is the emptiness that comes from thinking of godliness as the avoidance of doing bad things instead of the aggressive pursuit of doing good things.

So maybe it was the right way after all. If this was lost, let us all be lost always.

I was as lost as she - and far less significant. I had gleaned all that my gifts offered, and had now no occupation other than to nurture my dismay.

When the younger son was no longer considered a human being by the people around him, he felt the profundity of his isolation, the deepest loneliness one can experience. He was truly lost, and it was this complete lostness that brought him to his senses.

I can see three ways to a truly compassionate fatherhood: grief, forgiveness, and generosity. Grief is the discipline of the heart that sees the sin of the world, and knows itself to be the sorrowful price of freedom without which love cannot bloom. I am beginning to see that much of praying is grieving. Grief allows me to see beyond my wall and realize the immense suffering that results from human lostness.

The lostness of the resentful "saint" is so hard to reach precisely because it is so closely wedded to the desire to be good and virtuous.

The jubilation of God's salvation corresponds to man's very real condition of lostness ... In Scripture, there is never any mention of a relativizing of sin since any such relativizing of sin would also automatically relativize the unspeakably wonderful nature of salvation.

our age in its honest moments admits its lostness.

It was sadness, lostness, and the worst thing about it was the way it seemed like a default—like it was there all the time, and all her other expressions were just an array of masks she used to cover it up.

No one ever thinks his way out of despair. He must be rescued by the "event" of love. Explanations usually drive a despairing one deeper into lostness or prove to be untrue by pretending to be complete.

Why is there this criminal indifference to the lostness of men? Our condemnation is that we know how to live better than we are living.

Jesus understood the great significance of images. He intentionally selected an image that would brilliantly convey himself and his message: the cross. The cross represents the lostness of man, as well as the sacrifice of God and the abandonment to God that brings redemption.

The problem with the flesh lies in its weakness and lostness when uncoupled from God's Spirit, which is precisely the condition of humanity apart from Christ. To live in the flesh, to live with uncrucified affections and desires, is simply a matter of putting them in the ultimate position in our lives. Whatever we want becomes the most important thing.

Never does a person see any beauty in Christ as a Savior, until they discover that they are a lost and ruined sinner.

God does some of God's best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.

Christians are simply pilgrims who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.

Kai, she thought, you are as lost as I am. You have no idea where this beauty comes from and you know better than to think that such clarity could come from your own heart. Maybe, like Sparrow, Kai was terrified that one day the sound would shut off.

Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, the processes of coordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the coordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved.

carne-not-vale but salve, a loud hello and hallelujah both, a dizzying lostness in which was found another version of yourself, one that was tasting smoke and chocolate and make-up, none of which you liked but did now, even as your wrists were singing, the egg on your forehead breaking, and your eyes agape from the out-of-this-world experience of your face eaten by a swan.