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Quotations I love: Become what you already are

Lynne Baab • Thursday February 18 2021

“The Christian indicative statement is not ‘This is what you ought to be.’ The Christian imperative is not ‘Now be as much like this as possible.’ Instead, the indicative is ‘You are already thus; your true life is this.’ And the imperative is ‘Enter upon your possession.’ In the familiar epigram so often used to describe the Christian position, it is a matter of ‘Become what you already are’; and that is a strikingly different approach from ‘Try to be a bit better than you are.’” —C. F. D. Moule [1]

During Lent in my childhood, I would often give up candy. This...

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Quotations I love: Eugene Peterson on anything goes in prayer

Lynne Baab • Friday February 12 2021

A few weeks ago, after a blog post on prayer, a friend wrote to me: “I do intend to pray, and these days I cry out to the Lord many times during the course of each day, but I’m having a tough time being intentional about prayer, including making time for prayer and what I pray for.” She wrote about her desire to learn “habit stacking,” always a great idea. Habit stacking might involve praying for sick friends every time you hear an ambulance or praying a psalm right after you brush your teeth each night.

The most common thing I hear...

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Quotations I love: the consolation of imaginary things

Lynne Baab • Wednesday February 3 2021

“The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.” —Roger Scruton (English philosopher, 1944-2020, author of Art and Imagination, 1974).

My friend is telling me how much she loves West Wing. She tells me: “Often at bedtime, I get out one of my West Wing DVDs and watch an episode or two, just because I want to spend time with those people.”

A few weeks later, I am reading A Memoir of Jane Austen, written in 1870 by her nephew, J. E. Austen-Leigh. He writes about some of the favorite characters in the Jane Austen novels, “who have been admitted as familiar guests to the...

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Quotations I love: G. K. Chesterton on doing things badly

Lynne Baab • Friday January 29 2021

I was in my early thirties when a friend said she had come across a very helpful quotation. “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” she said. She told me she had been raised to do things well, and she found living up to that standard to be paralyzing. She talked about the fact that she never wrote thank-you notes after her wedding because she knew they had to say something kind about the present, and she wasn’t able to do that. So she did nothing.

She told me that she had learned to write, “Thanks for the present,” then sign her...

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