February book review -Between the dreaming and the coming true

Well, thanks for humoring me by reading my favorite book this month. I loved the comments about how it was even better the 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. time. It's totally true. And I'm glad the new people liked it too. I knew you would! :)

I'm going to list a few of our favorite quotes from the book as a summary. These and many more have been plastered around my life in various seasons as gentle reminders of the grace of God. I'm going to list them by page number for reference purposes.

3. Those who pray the Psalms by heart do not rattle easily.

5. What we have here on Earth is a longing-for the God we have known and for the God we are going home to.

9. What I fear now is that I will somehow miss the point of living here at all, living here between the dreaming and the coming true.

38. I have come to believe that the thing God said just before "Let there be light" was "Good-bye dark."

52. We are closing our ears and then blaming God for the silence.

75. How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. - Annie Dillard

76. There is no shortage of good days, declares Dillard, It is good lives that are hard to come by.

110. If we take the Eucharist once a year, take no time to be apart and to listen to the Voice, give God some directives and pointers for five minutes a day and call it prayer, and do none of the things that the faithful who traveled the road before us would remind us to do, then we are likely to only talk to God, and never hear a response.

111. A prayerful life is a life in which nothing, absolutely nothing is done, said, or understood independently of the One who is the origin and purpose of our existence. - Henri Nouwen

123. Perhaps we who would follow Him, we who seek to be His body in this world, would do well to pray as He prayed, to pray as His followers first prayed, to seek to live a life of prayer and devotion as did those who first followed Him.

139. Once we start home toward God-which happens the minute we start, actually-we simply do not ever turn around and head in another direction. There is no other direction.

Last Page: Which is in the end the object of the exercise; to become the saints we were dreamed into being to become. The journey between the dreaming and the coming true is a journey made on holy ground. It is a journey made through silence and longing where, if we will listen, we can hear the whisper of the Dreamer echoing deep within us, calling us to become what the Dreamer sees when our names were first whispered: saints who believe in and pay attention for and recognize the Voice; saints who live our lives in joy and confidence and hope rather than judgement and anxiety and desperation; saints whose hours and days and lives are spent carrying people to the Christ, lending each other a hand when one of us has fallen, slipping along the river that brings joy to the heart of God, carrying God's peace and love and presence and life to those we meet along the way. That is what we have been sent here to do. And we will.