Two Vital Questions
“There are two questions to our search...what does it mean to be human, to have a soul, to have destiny and eternity within...and the second, is there a God and does He/She have anything to say to me.”
Shannon Dexter Barnes // A purpose-driven leader, strategist, coach, husband, father, friend, and grace-covered pilgrim looking to change the world...starting with me.
“There are two questions to our search...what does it mean to be human, to have a soul, to have destiny and eternity within...and the second, is there a God and does He/She have anything to say to me.”
“An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.'' - John Gardner, Excellence
“It is essential to distinguish between hoping and wishing. They are not the same thing.
“Wishing is something all of us do. It projects what we want or think we need into the future. Just because we wish for something good or holy we think it qualifies as hope. It does not. Wishing extends our egos into the future; hope desires what God is going to do – and we don’t yet know what that is.
“Wishing grows out of our egos; hope grows out of our faith. Hope is oriented toward what God is going; wishing is oriented toward what we are doing. Wishing has to do with what I want in things or people or God; hope has to do with what God wants in me and the world of things and people beyond me.
“Wishing is our will projected into the future, and hope is God’s will coming out of the future. Picture it in your mind: wishing is a line that comes out of me, with an arrow pointing into the future. Hoping is a line that comes out of God from the future, with an arrow pointing toward me.
“Hope means being surprised, because we don’t know what is best for us or how our lives are going to be completed. To cultivate hope is to suppress wishing – to refuse to fantasize about what we want, but live in anticipation of what God is going to do next.” – Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor
“Hope is a response to the future which has its foundations in the promises of God. It looks at the future as time for the completion of God’s promises. It refuses to extrapolate either desire or anxiety into the future, but instead believes that God’s promise gives the proper content to it. But hope is not a doctrine about the future: it is a grace cultivated in the present, it is a stance in the present which deals with the future. As such it is misunderstood if it is valued only for the comfort it brings; as if it should say, “Everything is going to be all right in the future because God is in control of it, therefore relax and be comforted.” Hope operates differently. Christian hope alerts us to the possibilities of the future as a field of action, and as a consequence fills the present with energy.” – Eugene Peterson, Like Dew Your Youth
“Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.” - Goethe
