True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” Buechner’s definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world; it begins, wisely,...
Use the things of this world as nature needs them, but not with excessive attachment. For it would be very displeasing to God if you were to set your heart on something of less value than yourself. That would be nothing but a surrender of your dignity.
The awareness that we are yet meant to do more than we are signals where God lies in wait for us to become what we are meant to be. Then the spiritual life, the awareness of a driving energy within that is greater than ourselves, greater than anything around us,...
But sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is. We must find our real self in all...
It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms open. One has to embrace the world...
The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. “Faking...
Yet faith happens in the in-betweens, the interruptions, the thresholds. It happens when I’ve left this room where I was in control, where I had my self-explanation, where I had my ego boundaries, where I had my moral sense of my own rightness and superiority.
Why is it so hard to believe Christ and trust him completely? Christ wants to give us his life and spirit, and if we look to him for only a moment, our hearts tell us: Here is one we can trust. Yet each of us knows feelings of fear and anxiety. Something in us seeks...
Conversion is primarily an unselfing. The first birth of the individual is into his own little world. He is controlled by the deep-seated instincts of self-preservation and self-enlargement—instincts which are, doubtless, a direct inheritance from his brute ancestry....
Most of us fear community because we think it will call us away from ourselves… What a curious conception of self we have! We have forgotten that self is a moving intersection of many other selves. We are formed by the lives which intersect ours.