The collection / 28 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

The only other person I have fallen in love with that way is Jesus, and I hope that goes more smoothly. I hope I remember, when I'm bored with Him, and antsy, and sick of brushing my teeth next to the same god every morning, I hope I remember not to leave Him. I am not so worried that He will leave me. The Bible, after all, is full of stories about God sticking with His Bride, no matter how stiff-necked and prideful and unfaithful she may be.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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02Undated

Phyllis and I pray these chaplets together; at three o'clock, every first Saturday. We are never in the same town. For months, we do not speak on the phone or email. We pray these chaplets for just a few minutes, maybe as many as sixty minutes, once a month on a Saturday afternoon. Intimacy with the elusive God is that kind of intimacy. It is the closeness of praying together, apart.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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03Undated

But I am beginning to understand about the dignity and the art of wigs and the makeup. This small, everyday attentiveness of eyebrow pencils is perhaps a picture of the very sort of bodily care our embodied God would have us cultivate, weather in illness or wellness, whether our bodies are in the throes of ecstasy or the throes of pain.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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04Undated

God cares about our dietary choices. This should come as no surprise; you only have to read the first two chapters of Genesis to see God's concern for food. Humanity's first sin was disobedience manifested in a choice about eating. Adam and Eve were allowed to eat anything they wanted, except the one fruit they chose. And the New Testament makes clear that God cares about the most basic quotidian aspect of our lives. (Our God, after all, is the God who provides for the sparrows and numbers the hairs on our heads.) This God who is interested in how we speak, how we handle our money, how we carry our bodies - He is also interested in how we live with food.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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05Undated

Jews are obligated to fulfill the particularities of Mosaic law. They don't light Sabbath candles simply because candles make them feel close to God, but because God commanded the lighting of candles: Closeness might be a nice by-product, but it is not the point. Christians will understand candle-lighting a little differently. Spiritual practices don't justify us. They don't save us. Rather, they refine our Christianity; they make the inheritance Christ gives us on the Cross more fully our own... Practicing the spiritual disciplines does not make us Christians. Instead, the practicing teaches us what it means to live as Christians.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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06Undated

Food is part of God's creating. A right relationship with food points us toward Him.... The table is not only a place where we can become present to God. The table is also a place where He becomes present to us.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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07Undated

A few days before the confirmation service, she told her father—the pastor of the church—that she wasn't sure she could go through with it. She didn't know that she really believed everything she was supposed to believe, and she didn't know that she should proclaim in front of the church that she was ready to believe it forever."What you promise when you are confirmed," said Julian's father, "is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that that is the story you will wrestle with forever.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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08Undated

On any given morning, I might not be able to list for you the facts I know about God. But I can tell you what I wish to commit myself to, what I want for the foundation of my life, how I want to see. When I stand with the faithful at Holy Comforter and declare that we believe in one God . . . I am saying, Let this be my scaffolding. Let this be the place I work, struggle, play, rest. I commit myself to this.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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09Undated

The Spirit is the reason we can build a church and have confidence that we will get it at least a little bit right.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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10Undated

And I understood that I ought not ask for a prayer language until I could ask without making it the test of my entire faith.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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11Undated

Some days, I believe the Christian story even more than I believe in Australia. After all, I have never been to Australia, it is just a picture on a map. I don't know if I will ever go there, but I know that eventually I am going to Glory.Living the Christian life, however, is not about that Australia kind of believing. It is about a promise to believe even when you don't.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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12Undated

In the words of Jewish liturgical scholar Lawrence Hoffman, 'Jews do offer freely composed prayers... But overall, it is the fixed order and content of Jewish prayer that gives it its distinctiveness and that demands the personal commitment to prayer as a discipline.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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13Undated

But if roteness is a danger, it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of praying; you are free to participate in the life of God.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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14Undated

Sure, sometimes it is great when, in prayer, we can express to God just what we feel; but better still when, in the act of praying, our feelings change. Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. it re-points the person praying, taking him somewhere else.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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15Undated

... I am not the author of my prayers; when they come, they come from God.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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16Undated

It is a great gift when God gives me a stirring, a feeling, a something-at-all in prayer. But work is being done whether I feel it or not.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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17Undated

I knew, as soon as I woke up, that the dream had come from God and it was about the reality of Jesus. The truth of Him. The He was a person whose pronouns you had to capitalize. That He was God.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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18Undated

The anxious heart, in its flailings, loses its hold on whatever grace God has bestowed upon it, and is sapped of the strength to "resist the temptations of the Evil One, who is all the more ready to fish...in troubled waters.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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19Undated

It means the God who worries about our sins is not only God the judge, but also God the caretaker. He worries about sin because He craves righteousness, but also, simply, because He loves us.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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20Undated

Sometimes I cannot say much about why I go to church other than what people who go to the gym say: I always feel better once I'm there; I feel better after; it is always good for me, not good in a take-your-vitamins way, in a chidingly moralistic way, but in a palpable way.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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21Undated

Ellie tells me, often, some variation on this theme: that I am a little too invested in how I'm feeling about church and God, and perhaps not invested enough in how I am serving church, God, neighbor.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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22Undated

It's not all about mountaintops. Mostly it's about training so that you'll know the mountaintop for what it is when you get there.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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23Undated

(Meanwhile, other people seem to be getting along with God just fine, very well indeed. Why not me?)

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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24Undated

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt, or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.

Lauren F. Winner / quote

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