Followers want change only when they aren’t happy and usually when it doesn’t require much risk or sacrifice on their part.  A leader seldom marshals troops who are willing to sweat, let alone die.  One can speak of vision and mission, calling and opportunity until the cows come home, but when the day ends, most people want nothing more demanding than some television and a few uncomplicated laughs.

-Dan Allender

Don’t miss this:  leadership that mimics Jesus will not be normal.  It will be neither expected nor, in most cases, preferred.  It will be disruptive and anomalous, and it will demand one’s body and soul, fortune, reputation, and all the other small gods that keep our lives safe and satisfied.  Here is God’s leadership model:  he chooses fools to live foolishly in order to reveal the economy of heaven, which reverses and inverts the wisdom of this world.  He calls us to brokenness, not performance; to relationships, not commotion; to grace, not success.

-Dan Allender

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

-John Locke

The way to liberation and rest lies through a decision and a practice.

The decision is to release the world and your fate, including your reputation and “success,” into the hands of God. This is not a decision to not act at all, though in some situations it may come to that. It is, rather, a decision concerning how you will act: you will act in dependence on God. You will not take charge of outcomes. You will do your part, of course, but your part will always be chastened by a sense of who God is–not you!

A decision to release the world and our fate to God runs contrary to everything within and around us. We have been had by a system of behavior that was here before we were and seeps into every pore of our being. “Sin,” Paul tells us, “was in the world,” even before the law came. It forms us internally and pressures us externally. Hence we must learn to choose things that meet with God’s actions of grace to break us out of the system. These things are the disciplines of life in the Spirit, well known from Christian history but much avoided and misunderstood. For those who do not understand our desperate situation, these disciplines look strange or even harmful. But they are absolutely necessary for those who would find rest for their soul in God and not live the distracted existence Pascal so accurately portrays.

-Dallas Willard

But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?

I answer, What if He knows Prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God’s idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need–the need of Himself? Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need: prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer. So begins a communion, a talking with God, a coming-to-one with Him, which is the sole end of prayer.

-George MacDonald

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

-Marcus Aurelius

The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons with God Himself at the very center of this community as its prime Sustainer and most glorious Inhabitant.

-Dallas Willard

Resilience is a mindset. Resilient people see challenges as opportunities. They do not seek problems, but they understand that they will ultimately be strengthened by them. Rather than engaging in self-doubt, catastrophic thinking, or a mindset of victimization (why me?), they seek solutions.

-Kenneth Ginsburg

As we become more aware of the dynamics of our unconscious, we can receive people and events as they are, rather than filtered through what we would like them to be, expect them to be, or demand them to be. This requires letting go of the attachments, aversions, “shoulds,” and demands on others and on life that reflect the mentality of a child rather than that of a grownup. The latter, under normal conditions, is responsible for his or her choices.

-Thomas Keating