Alicia Britt Chole Quotes

In seasons of hiddenness our sense of value is disrupted, stripped of what "others" affirmed us to be. In this season God intends to give us an unshakable identity in Him, that no amount of adoration nor rejection can alter.

Jesus appears to have walked unstressed and unhurried. His peaceful pace seems to imply that he measured himself not by where he was going and how fast he could get there but by whom he was following and how closely they walked together.

In these early anonymous seasons, God graciously grants us the opportunity to wrestle with our appetites before other lives are at stake, to struggle with our passions privately before moral collapse affects the innocent publicly.

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.” —C. S. Lewis (1898–1963)3

Patience grows well in such soil. She is the ally of a soul that makes God its primary pursuit,

The purpose of Lent is not to force on us a few formal obligations, but to ‘soften’ our heart so that it may open itself to the realities of the spirit, to experience the hidden ‘thirst and hunger’ for communion with God.

Jesus’ true strength was not revealed in his ability to teach and lead the multitudes. It was manifested in his willingness to make himself nothing, to suffer, and to die. I had enough strength to exhaust myself studying, mentoring, and teaching, but I did not possess sufficient strength to be nothing.

Christian spirituality, the contemplative life, is not about us. It is about God. The great weakness of American spirituality is that it is all about us: fulfilling our potential, getting the blessings of God, expanding our influence, finding our gifts, getting a handle on principles by which we can get an edge over the competition. The more there is of us, the less there is of God. —EUGENE PETERSON

Jesus lived a truly uncluttered life and died a focused, eternally fruitful death. How I long to follow His example.

There must have been a problem, we offer. God must have something even better around the corner, we propose. Must He? Here, then is my Lenten plea for the day: let the mourning mourn. Grant those who grieve the dignity to ask questions. Bestow upon the bewildered permission to not edit their honesty. Crucifixion is, after all, serious work.

Deserts unclutter the soul. The hot desert sun vaporizes all manner of luxuries. Then the cold, shelterless nights expose the essential guts of life. I needed to eat, to sleep, to be protected, and to not be alone. Lent had come half a year early. God asked me to fast mental and physical strength. He invited me into holy weakness. I found Jesus there.

When He calls us to fast strength—when He drafts us into decrease—God’s purposes are clear: Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. (Deuteronomy 8:2

No. Our desire to “be like Jesus” contains several exemption clauses, not the least of which are Jesus’ hidden years, desert experiences, temptations, tortures, and crucifixion.

From John’s perspective, the true value of people seeing him was that people would then be positioned to see through him and gaze at Jesus. By

Holy gets angry. So does this mean we need to buy ropes and start making whips? No. But perhaps we need to stop hiding safely behind hashtag campaigns and instead show up and speak out.

Like a short spoon in a tall glass, people’s attention simply cannot reach the bottom of our profound longing to be valued. Only God can reach that place because he is the One who created that place.

Yet somehow Jesus’ actions were not matching John’s expectations. And that distance between what John thought Jesus would do and what Jesus actually did was straining John’s certainty of who Jesus was.

Lent is a much-needed mentor in an age obsessed with visible, measurable, manageable, and tweetable increase, for it invites us to walk with Jesus and His disciples through darker seasons that we would rather avoid: grief, conflict, misunderstanding, betrayal, restriction, rejection, and pain. Then Easter leads us in celebration of salvation as the stunningly satisfying fruit of Jesus’ sacred decrease.

key invitation of our spiritual journeys is to be emotionally honest about our uncertainties. Questions such as the one asked by John are signs of a living, growing, active faith, not evidence of a dying one.

Regret empties anticipation, flattens dreams, and suffocates hope, because regret is a form of self-punishment. Whereas hindsight helps us learn from the past, regret beats us up with the past. So for one entire day (or go for forty), I invite you to fast regret. Do not feed it. Do not give it space. Let it go: God’s mercies are “new every morning” (Lamentations 3:23). And meditate on Jesus’ glorious promise from Revelation 21:5: “I am making everything new!

On the cross, leadership dies. On the cross, success dies. On the cross, skills die, and excellence dies. All of my strengths—nailed to the cross. All of my weaknesses—nailed to the cross. All of my yearnings for bigger and better, for anything other than Christ himself—nailed to that same cross.

No matter how we rationalize, God will sometimes seem unfair from the perspective of a person trapped in time. . . . Not until history has run its course will we understand how ‘all things work together for good.’ Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.” — PHILIP YANCEY

But in anonymous seasons we must hold tightly to the truth that no doubt strengthened Jesus throughout his hidden years: Father God is neither care-less nor cause-less with how he spends our lives. When he calls a soul simultaneously to greatness and obscurity, the fruit—if we wait for it—can change the world.

What might be the fruit of fasting stinginess? What would happen if our churches fasted spectatorship? What might occur if our families fasted accumulation? What could change if our offices fasted revisionism? What might erupt if a new generation fasted escapism? Such fasts could trigger a spiritual revolution.

Regret empties anticipation, flattens dreams, and suffocates hope, because regret is a form of self-punishment. Whereas hindsight helps us learn from the past, regret beats us up with the past. So for one entire day (or go for forty), I invite you to fast regret. Do not feed it. Do not give it space. Let it go: God’s mercies are “new every morning

Though in our day we are more than a little obsessed with exact times and sequences, ancient writers were often less linear in worldview and, consequently, actual events were sometimes listed in an order consistent with a theme as opposed to chronologically. Such is the case in the Gospels when Matthew and Mark placed this emotionally charged exchange before Jesus’ flogging and John positioned this exchange after the flogging.5

I am not moved, my God, to love you By the heaven you have promised me. Neither does hell, so feared, move me To keep me from offending you. You move me, Lord, and I am moved seeing you Scoffed at and nailed on a cross. I am moved seeing your body so wounded. Your injuries and your death move me. It is your love that moves me, and in such a way that even though there were no heaven, I would love you, and even though there were no hell I would fear you. You do not have to give me anything so that I love you, For even if I didn’t hope for what I hope, As I love you now, so would I love you. —ANONYMOUS SPANISH POET, OFTEN ATTRIBUTED TO JOHN OF THE CROSS (1542

Without any supplementary body support, the victim would die from muscular spasms and asphyxia in a very short time, certainly within two or three hours. . . . In order to prolong the agony, Roman executioners devised two instruments that would keep the victim alive on the cross for extended periods of time. One, known as a sedile, was a small seat attached to the front of the cross, about halfway down. This device provided some support for the victim’s body. . . . Both Erenaeus and Justin Martyr describe the cross of Jesus as having five extremities rather than four; the fifth was probably the sedile. To increase the victim’s suffering, the sedile was pointed, thus inflicting horrible pain.

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert. —Matthew 4:1 The sky ripped open, the Holy Spirit took the form of a dove and rested upon Jesus, God thundered his unfailing love from the heavens, and then he ushered his beloved Son into . . . the desert? What? “I love you, Son. Enjoy . . . the desert”? Generally speaking, this series of events makes us a little uncomfortable. Can following God’s Spirit lead us straight into a desert? Would obedience deposit us in a wasteland? Could God’s loving will direct us to wander about in barren places? Evidently. From Jesus’ example, this appears to be true. We just do not talk about it often. Our earthbound hearts prefer to consider how following God leads us into happiness or health or wealth. “God led me into a desert! (hallelujah)” is just not the stuff T-shirts are made of. Even so, did not Jesus’ three decades of hiddenness already qualify as a desert experience? Yes. But in that desert of anonymity Jesus made peace with God’s timing and concluded that Father God’s companionship in his life was enough. From Jesus’ perspective, his hidden years were good years: neither wasted nor unwanted. Therefore, we find no evidence of resistance when the Holy Spirit directs Jesus into another type of desert. Matthew simply states that Jesus was “led” there.

Jesus appears to have walked unstressed and unhurried. His peaceful pace seems to imply that he measured himself not by where he was going and how fast he could get there but by whom he was following and how closely they walked together. Patience grows well in such soil. She is the ally of a soul that makes God its primary pursuit, because in this journey called life, regardless of the scenery, such a soul is deeply contented in the Company.

The Father’s work in us does not sleep—though in spiritual winters he retracts all advertisement. And when he does so, he is purifying our faith, strengthening our character, conserving our energy, and preparing us for the future. The sleepy days of winter hide us so that seductive days of summer will not ruin us.

Christian spirituality is not a life project for becoming a better person.” —EUGENE PETERSON

the disciples’ illusions of what Jesus could and should do with His power were shattered by the reality of what Jesus actually did with His power, and their personal illusions of commitment-unto-death were shattered by the reality of fear-inspired self-protection.

Christian spirituality, the contemplative life, is not about us. It is about God. The great weakness of American spirituality is that it is all about us: fulfilling our potential, getting the blessings of God, expanding our influence, finding our gifts, getting a handle on principles by which we can get an edge over the competition. The more there is of us, the less there is of God.

We all guard against sins of commission and we are vigilant toward sins of omission. But achievements—even in small doses—can make us vulnerable to sins of addition: adding niceties and luxuries to our list of basic needs, adding imaginations onto the strong back of vision, adding self-satisfaction to the purity of peace.

God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is life with God which demands these things. . . . You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that the darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.” — ANNIE DILLARD1

The question asked is not, ‘What should be happening in my life?’ but ‘What is happening in my life?’ The present moment, the present set of circumstances, the present relationships in our lives—this is where God lives. This is where God meets us and gives us life.” — ALICE FRYLING

more of a sojourn. A sojourn is a “temporary stay at a place.”4 And a “stay” is about presence, not productivity.

To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.

In moments when I am tempted to treat this gift called time as though it were some unfortunate filler, I hear a gentle whisper from God in my soul: “Child, I am the God who wastes no man’s time. To me, every course in your life is main.

When our ways are not God’s ways—though it may be unspeakably uncomfortable—we must wrestle with the discrepancy between what we think God should do and what he actually does and allow that struggle to edit our tidy, but tame, image of God. If we wrestle with these questions with the lamp of God’s Word by our side, an increasingly accurate portrait of God will emerge from our faith struggle, a portrait that is strong enough to trust in, good enough to wait for, and wild enough to never be contained in a box.

Our generation no longer capitalizes truth; we keep it small so that we do not offend. And so, we cheer one another on to “find your own [small t] truth,” unconstrained by history, logic, or even evidence. Because, after all . . . who really knows?

Some things just have to be believed to be seen.” —PHILIP YANCEY

When those pauses extend beyond what we can comprehend or explain (say, for instance, three days), we often spiral into selfdoubt or second-guessing. But in anonymous seasons we must hold tightly to the truth that no doubt strengthened Jesus throughout his hidden years: Father God is neither care-less nor cause-less with how he spends our lives. When he calls a soul simultaneously to greatness and obscurity, the fruit—if we wait for it—can change the world.

I feel that trials do not prepare us for what’s to come as much as they reveal what we’ve done with our lives up to this point.

In our daily lives, we may prefer self-reliance. But perhaps utter dependence is the truer friend of our souls.

The problem is a broad and complicated one. There is, first, the very problematic of penance and asceticism for modern men and women—a problem which, unlike the Protestant rejection of penance, comes from modern psychology, and the quest for meaning and sincerity in an increasingly dehumanized technological world. Modern Christians reject penance and asceticism because they often lead to the distortion or destruction of more important human values. Hard things are not necessarily good things. . . . And anyway, what is the value of self-inflicted pain for modern men and women whose whole drive is to eliminate pain, to develop in freedom the autonomous self?6 Perhaps in our day, a rediscovery of Lent may help marry the modern celebration of grace with the mystery of sacrificial love treasured by the ancients. Today’s Reading: John 20:24–31 [Your Notes]

The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power.

The glorious mystery is that listening for God holds power whether or not anything is heard.

Brother Lawrence, known for his intimacy with God, wrote, “The foundation of spiritual life, for me, has been a high image of God and a high esteem of God.”2

God keeps our hearts peaceful (sound, complete, well) when we keep our minds trust-full (steadfast upon Him).

When we are disillusioned, we too must resist isolation. Even in loss—especially in loss—we are stronger together than alone.

Clearly, He delights in our use of them. But thinking is not the same as trusting. And trust—with or without understanding—is how we follow God through the night.

Though often excused with “I’m just being honest,” it seems to me that cynicism is more about interior discontent than honesty. Honesty is a means of honoring reality, whereas cynicism is a focus on any negative at the expense of all positive.

The same can happen in our relationship with God. He does not bite, but life sure can. Shocked that God did not protect us from the pain, we easily isolate ourselves from Him. In self-protection, we distance our hearts from faith, hope, and even love to avoid further disappointment.

We weaken—not strengthen—our faith when we silence sincere questions. Faith in Christ is not an airy substance that rests on unquestioning souls. Biblical faith is muscular, thickened more through trials than ease.[2] To strengthen our faith in God, we need to be honest when we are disillusioned with God.

How often is disillusionment with ourselves inspired by unrealistic expectations of ourselves? And how often are our expectations shaped not by our God, but by our anxiety, fear of rejection, perfectionism, pursuit of favor, or tendency to measure ourselves comparatively? Yes, growing can be uncomfortable and even embarrassing. But theologically, growing should not be shaming.

Faith viewed as a performance is often motivated by fear and self protection. Its focus is perfection. Its goal is to avoid even the appearance of failure. If we view faith as a performance, we often see God as a critic watching our every move with skeptical eyes, red pen in hand, evaluating us by criteria beyond anyone’s reach. As a journey, however, faith viewed as a pilgrimage is motivated by love and glad surrender. Its focus is direction. Its goal is to follow Jesus wherever he leads in the day or the night. If we view faith as a pilgrimage, we will see God as our companion, guide, and destination. In fact, if we view faith as more of a pilgrimage than a performance, we will see God more than we see ourselves.

Fear disguises itself as realism, and we invite it to the table. Fear presents itself as troubleshooting, and we welcome its wisdom. Fear offers itself as a prophet, and we sit at its feet to prepare for our future.

Grace overcomes shame, not by uncovering an overlooked cache of excellence in ourselves but simply by accepting us, the whole of us, with no regard to our beauty or our ugliness, our virtue or our vices. We are accepted wholesale. . . . Accepted once and accepted forever. Accepted at the ultimate depth of our being.[1] Many of us feel shame not for our too-badness but for our not-good-enoughness.[2] Grace heals our shame . . . by removing the one thing all our shame makes us fear the most: rejection.[3]