August 1

Sin is more than turning our backs on God, it is turning our backs on life! Immorality is much more than adultery and dishonesty, it is living drab, colorless, dreary, stale, unimaginative lives. The greatest enemy of Christianity may be people who say they believe in Jesus but who are no longer astonished or amazed.

Mike Yaconelli Dangerous Wonder 25

July 29

When parents understand their role, they understand that they do not exist to answer every question their children have. Parents must help children discern the important questions, the life-giving questions. Christianity must do the same. Alan Jones says that priests "are not so much people with answers as ones who guard the important questions and keep them alive.:

Mike Yaconelli Dangerous Wonder 46,47

July 28

For many of us, the fear that protected us from dying when we were young prohibits us from living now. Fear keeps us from experimenting, from taking chances, from trying the new, from choosing the discomfort of exploring uncharted waters, from stepping out in the darkness, from going where no one else has gone.

Mike Yaconelli Dangerous Wonder 61,2

July 27

It is time for Christianity to become a place of terror again; a place where God continually has to tell us, "Fear not"; a place where our relationship with God is not a simple belief or theology, but the constant awareness of God's terrifying presence in our lives...Our God is perfectly capable of both calming the storm and putting us in the middle of one.

Mike Yaconelli 125, Dangerous Wonder

July 26

Just finished rereading Dangerous Wonder by Mike Yaconelli. I think it meant more to me now because I have kids. The next couple days, I'll leave you with some of my favorite quotes to ponder.

Reality is complicated, life is complicated, God is complicated. His footprints are not easy to see in the dust and dirt of the real world's trail. And when we are lost in the forest, we want to find God's tracks. When it's dark and we're stuck in a boat during a gale, we don't want dark, indistinguishable shapes roaming around on the water. We get frightened when we lose track of God. We get terrified when we are not sure what God is doing...One of the glorious complications of God is His ability to reveal Himself in the unrevealable. God is not lost when we are. God is waiting for us even in the darkness!

p132

July 25

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins, and live for righteousness; by his wounds we are healed.

1 Peter 2:24

Here in this verse, Peter is saying that Jesus died so that we could die to sin. I sense I do not fully appreciate the vulgarity of my sin, nor do I treasure the gift that it is to live for righteousness. There is a famous image of two lines moving away from each other at an angle. One is our understanding of our sin, the other is our understanding of God's righteousness. In between, is the cross. As we grow in these two understanding of these two things... sin and righteousness... the cross gets bigger.

July 22

In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future; nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:37-39

If that don't help you, I don't know what will.