“I am the Little Bug Spirit. I come to people when they begin to take themselves too seriously. They think they are big. I cut them down to size." This angered me. I tried to speak, but I couldn't get my thoughts together. The person went on, “I am the stone under your foot. I am the bug that bites you in the ass. I am the fart that comes when you are introduced to the important visiting professor. I am menstrual cramps and diarrhea." I kept getting angrier. “My tools are lies and tricks, misunderstandings and accidents. Everything stupid and undignified happens because of me. Hola! I am something!”
― quote from A Woman of the Iron People
“I am the Little Bug Spirit. I come to people when they begin to take themselves too seriously. They think they are big. I cut them down to size.”
― quote from A Woman of the Iron People
“Knowledge—by itself—is an intervention. Our presence changes the way the natives see the world. According to her, there is no way to study these people without causing change." “The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,”
― quote from A Woman of the Iron People
“What had they been thinking of, those people then? They had left their descendants almost no water and great mountains of uranium. What kind of inheritance was that? How did they think we were going to survive?”
― quote from A Woman of the Iron People
“It's a typical Western bias. You think a tool is more important than a dream because a tool can be measured and a dream cannot.”
― quote from A Woman of the Iron People
“She talked like that. But I understood what she meant. About having another you inside that isn't anything like you. Dorcas and I used to make up love scenes and describe them to each other. It was fun and a little smutty. Something about it bothered me, though. Not the loving stuff, but the picture I had of myself when I did it. Nothing like me. I say myself as somebody I'd seen in a picture show or a magazine. Then it would work. If I pictured myself the way I am it seemed wrong.”
― Toni Morrison, quote from Jazz
“I want him to live,” he says.
I watch,
helpless,
as the pain slips out.
Tears fall
when he whispers,
“But damn it, I want to live, too.”
― Lisa Schroeder, quote from The Day Before
“believed he'd discovered sort of a forgotten link between Jesus and Augustus. Some truth that had been known to Constantine, but had been lost to the general public before — and since.”
― Kenneth Atchity, quote from The Messiah Matrix
“What is the ultimate good in the good news? It all ends in one thing: God himself. All the words of the gospel lead to him, or they are not gospel.
Salvation is not good news if it only saves from hell and not for God.
Forgiveness is not good news if it only gives relief from guilt and doesn't open the way to God.
Justification is not good news if it only makes us legally acceptable to God but doesn't bring fellowship with God.
Redemption is not good news if it only liberates us from bondage but doesn't bring us to God.
Adoption is not good news if it only puts us in the Father's family but not in his arms.
This is crucial. Many people seem to embrace the good news without embracing God. There is no sure evidence that we have a new heart just because we want to escape hell. That's a perfectly natural desire, not a supernatural one.
It doesn't take a new heart to want the psychological relief of forgiveness, or the removal of God's wrath, or the inheritance of God's world. All these things are understandable without any spiritual change. You don't need to be born again to want these things.
The devils want them.
It is not wrong to want them. Indeed it is folly not to.
But the evidence that we have been changed is that we want these things because they bring us to the enjoyment of God. This is the greatest thing Christ died for. "Christ also suffered once for sin, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God”
― John Piper, quote from The Passion of Jesus Christ
“If others neither have goods we want nor can perform services we need, we make sure that they are at a safe distance and close ourselves off from them so that their emaciated and tortured bodies can make no inordinate claims on us.”
― Miroslav Volf, quote from Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
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