"When God Interrupts" by M. Craig Barnes

This was a fantastic book! I'm sure there will be at least one more post from this book. Here are some of my favorite lines:

*Saints aren't born. They are made along the way. p. 16

*We are invited to witness what Episcopal priest Alan Jones has called the "unfinishedness of human existence." p. 16

*We will probably spend most of life with family, friends, good health, and good work. But they are not ours by rights. They are not promised to us. We may have to give them back to God at any moment. Someday we will give back. The trick is to learn how to do that before they leave us. That allows us to spend the rest of our lives enjoying them as the temporary gifts that they are.

*Abandonment has become a permanent social dynamic that is feeding off itself. As children of broken homes grow older, they find it difficult to trust commitments and frequently sabotage them out of fear. Some never get close enough to be hurt. Others just make sure they always leave first. p. 19

*In the future we will need to maintain faith in God in the midst of serious doubts that anything is certain. p. 21

*If Christian vocation is about what you are called to do, Christian conversion is about what you are called to be. p. 23

*But the main reason we don't want to go to the place Christ would call us is that we know that we will have to abandon our most cherished images of who we are. p. 23

*Nothing is ever wasted when God converts us. What we want changed is what God wants to transform into something useful. He will use our past hurts, our long detours in the wrong direction, our old gifts and skills. He will use all that religious stuff we've learned, and all those memory verses. p. 35

*They ponder. They get perplexed. The thin veneer of the ordinary has been scratched. p. 40

*These interruptions proclaim that life is not what we hoped for. It isn't even what we had settled for. God has interrupted our ordinary expectations, as cherished as they were, to conceive something. We can't manage it. We can't even understand it. All we can do is receive it. Because if God has conceived this thing, then it is holy, and it will save our lives. p. 41

*But we do know that no interruptions, be it tragic or delightful, is greater than our God. p. 42

*So we gather at church, young and old alike. Some of us Mary. Some of us Elizabeth. But our common terrifying realization, that life is not what we had thought, binds us together in a unified confession that God is mysteriously at work. And in that confession, hope is conceived. p. 42

*Conversion always occurs en route that places we do not wish to go. We can get there only if we have abandoned hope of returning to the place where we would rather be. p. 44

*When Christians really believe they need a savior, they are not as tempted to try to be the saviour for others. p. 51

*But making a difference is not the point. Giving love away is the point, and we can only do that if we have fallen in love with the grace of our own saviour. p. 52

*The challenge to people of faith is to learn how to follow. Central to that task is giving up the expectation of knowing where we are going.

*It is possible to get so lost in the success of our choices that we assume success means our choices were right. But typically, success is just one more reason we need a savior. p. 67

*Jesus, the coming Judge, chose to descend in to the ambiguities of compromised, complicated, and conflicted lives. p. 69

*We killed Jesus, not because he claimed to be the Messiah but because he became like us. This is a blasphemy against our greatest hopes for what a messiah will do. p. 69

*There is no better way to lose your life than to constantly measure it. p. 71

*Christianity isn't something we get good at. If the goal is to receive the love of God, then the only way to progress in the faith is to confess how lost we have become. p. 73

*Failure is refusing to risk what will happen if we follow Jesus. p. 74

*Faith means betting our lives on the grace of God. p. 75

*a calling to love our God, who saves us from the things we do to make us worthy of a love that can only be received. p. 80

*Jesus is the savior who encounters us in the midst of our futile plans for making life better. p. 90

*The Healer is with us, and he is with this world that is running out of plans.

*Every abandonment is the invitation ot strive with God. p. 100

*As we struggle to understand and fearfully take God on, the promise is that we too will see his force. He does not give us the things we want. he does not give us explanations. he just gives us himself. In the church we call that discovery worship. And that, we believe, is the purpose of life. p. 100

*If the church limits its ministry to holding up the "ideal family," it will miss its great opportunity to participate in God's conversion of those who long ago were abandoned by their ideals.

*But if we focus too narrowly on the dream we thought the savior would give us, then it is the dream that has become the savior, not Jesus. p. 116

*The deep fear lying behind every loss is that we have been abandoned by the God who should have saved us. The transforming moment in Christian conversion comes when we realize that even God has left us. We then discover it was not God, but our image of God, that abandoned us. This frees us to discover more of the mystery of God than we knew. Only then is change possible. p. 123

*He loves us too much to let our health, marriage or work become the savior of our lives. p. 124

*To receive Jesus as Savior means recognizing him asouronly help. p. 124

*Faith is what binds us to Christ when everything is gone, including our most cherished expectations of him. p. 126

*Once we discover that God has joined our tears and can be moved with compassion, the world becomes a very unpredictable place. p. 127

*It is not until we tire of the things we can do for ourselves in the Christian life that we will open ourselves to real conversion, which can be accomplished only by God. p. 130

*The best way to strengthen faith is not to scrutinize it, but to look at the One in whom we are trusting. p. 132

*I also get to watch how faith develops as a response to the silence of God. p. 135

*It was the search for the sacred that drove Tom away for the too-well-rehearsed answers that had been so much a part of his Christian background. He craved a relationship to something truly sacred, but all he had was a stale orthodoxy. If belief is nothing more than the right answers, it is not belief in God but in a religious system. p. 136

*Like the prodigal son, doubters don't come back to the Father's house because they have figured things out. p. 136

*Whenever we domesticate the mysterious into something familiar, it abandons us. p. 139

*If we are to find God, it will only be as a result of his finding us. God will have to join in our abandonment. p. 140

*Easter can't have an ending. it is not about what is finished but about what has just begun - a future that is so mysterious only God could write it. p. 143

*On the other side of abandonment, all of life becomes an expression of gratitude. The journey through loss was long and filled with pain. It cost us our lives. At the bottom of the abandonment, the only thing that was left was the love of God. But to be alone with the love of God is the only way to find life again. p. 144

*Either we believe life is something that must be achieved, or we believe life is something that can only be received. Once we start seeing this choice in the Bible, we find it on almost every page. p. 145

*But the truth is that the diseases of life have left us alliwth crippled relationships,crippled dreams and crippled health. By the time we make it to Jesus, all that is left is our rather common need for mercy. p. 149

*Our mission of service to God can never, never begin by thinking we have something to offer. p. 150

*If the first lesson on mission is to turn toward our suffering, the second is to then turn back to Jesus Christ in thanksgiving. p. 150

*Mission is simply what we find irresistible to do when we believe God loves us. p. 150

*As we make our way through the many abandonments of life and discover the new life that God is continuing to create, we realize that this new life does not look totally strange to us. What it looks like is a purer form of ourselves. It is the self we were created to be from the beginning. It is the restoration of the image of God in our lives. p. 157

*The saving work of Jesus Christ is that he finds us after we have lost our way trying to become something other than we are. p. 157

*However, if our starting place for mission is joyful gratitude for what God has done and is doing and is going to do, we are less likely to take over as anxious substitutes for the Creator. p. 158

*There is nothing as joyful as witnessing the salvation of the Lord. p. 158