Following are a few quotes I have come across that touch me — and I want to remember. May they bless you too as we live wide-open and wholeheartedly with HIm!

The Joy of Being Like Others At first sight, joy seems to be connected with being different. When you receive a compliment or win an award, you experience the joy of not being the same as others. You are faster, smarter, more beautiful, and it is that difference that brings you joy. But such joy is very temporary. True joy is hidden where we are the same as other people: fragile and mortal. It is the joy of belonging to the human race. It is the joy of being with others as a friend, a companion, a fellow traveler.This is the joy of Jesus, who is Emmanuel: God-with-us. Henri Nouwen
“I feel there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”  Vincent Van Gogh

RELATIONSHIPS

“If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because 
a dose of joy is a spiritual cure.” Deitrich Bonhoeffer

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one. C. S. Lewis

“The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them.” — Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

“Christians who are worshiping God, studying the Bible, discipling or being discipled, and enjoying fellowship with one another can develop an effective  ministry of encouragement.  Encouragement is not the responsibility of a gifted few; it is the privilege of every believer. Every Christian can and should be an encourager.” Larry Crabbe – Encouragement, Page 134

“In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.” Dietrich Bonheoffer
―Letters and Papers from Prison

CREATIVITY

Dallas Willard:
 “I don’t want you to think of art as
 a little frill or whipped cream on the cake of life. 
It’s more like steak and potatoes.”

“Our gifts are not from God to us, but from God through us to the world.”  Janice Elsheimer, The Creative Call

“The child within is aware of all his feelings and moves freely in the Spirit to express them. The Pharisee within closes off feelings and makes a stereotyped response to life situations. The child represents the authentic self and the Pharisee the inauthentic. The child is fresh; the Pharisee stale.”      -Brennan Manning, Souvenirs of Solitude

Hidden Greatness There is much emphasis on notoriety and fame in our society. Our newspapers and television keep giving us the message: What counts is to be known, praised, and admired, whether you are a writer, an actor, a musician, or a politician.Still, real greatness is often hidden, humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. We must have strong self-confidence combined with deep humility. Some of the greatest works of art and the most important works of peace were created by people who had no need for the limelight. They knew that what they were doing was their call, and they did it with great patience, perseverance, and love. Henri Nouwen

“As you move to the rhythm of the Spirit of God, what is within you that you can now give to someone else? Not for the glory of yourself, but as a person who bears the image of God in the world. What are those things in the deepest part of who you are, the personality and desires and unique blending of history and circumstances and longing — what is most alive in you as you are united with Christ that you can now pour out as an offering unto God for the benefit of others?“Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion . . . To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything, a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”    -G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

No matter how small, how weak, how meager. No matter what skill or training or lack. That’s what it means to uncover the art you were born to make and release the art you were made to live.” Emily Freeman, A Million Little Waysa

Grantley Morris: “Our Lord is Creator as well as Savior, and the Maker of rainbows and nightingales didn’t suddenly lose his creative urge at the close of Day Six. God’s creativity is inexhaustible. And you were made for him. He longs to express his creativity through you. As an instrument and musician together make beautiful music, you and your Lord can unite to create exquisite beauty. What you can do together defies imagination.”

Ephesians 3:20 ESV   Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us,

Genesis 1:27 ESV   So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

GRACE

“Every experience God gives us, every experience He puts in our lives, is the perfect preparation for the future only He can see.” Corrie Ten Boom

“Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will.”  Deitrich Bonhoeffer

“Blessed assurance, Jesus assures: You don’t have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps — you only have to pull close.” Ann Voskamp

“We don’t need to sin more to deepen our appreciation of grace. We’ve already done quite enough to understand our desperate need. True brokenness yields appreciation. When we appreciate Christ for the kind of Person He is and the sort of love He extends to make us loveable, we begin to realize we really do want to follow Him.” Dr. Larry Crabb, Becoming a True Spiritual Community, Page 115

“I do not admire the term ‘progressive sanctification’, for it is unwarranted by Scripture. But it is certain that the Christian does grow in grace. And though his conflict may be as severe in the last day of his life as in the first moment of conversion, yet he does advance in grace — and all his imperfections and his conflicts within cannot prove that he has not made progress.“ ~ Charles Spurgeon

“The idolatry the exists in a man’s heart always wants to lead him away from his Savior and back to self-reliance no matter how pitiful that self-reliance is or how many times it has betrayed him.”
― Matt Chandler, The Explicit Gospel

“Our weaknesses may never go away but when we give them to God, His grace will turn them into something beautiful…”
― Heather Bixler, Breaking Pride

“All our good is more apparently from God, because we are first naked and wholly without any good, and afterwards enrich with all good.”
― Jonathan Edwards

Purpose

“When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending 
struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer