Scott Erickson Quotes

This isn't a journey of you becoming the perfect version of yourself; that's what cults are built on. This is the journey about receiving the gift of yourself - the beautiful, vulnerable you... that you're the kind of person who is relatable, touchable, and in solidarity with others on the journey of life.

Wonder is not an exterior destination to arrive at, like a mountaintop view, or a once in a lifetime concert. Those experiences may bring that feeling. But wonder is an internal filter through which we learn to look at life. This filter is always there, but it is most easily accessible to us in new situations, when we don't have a narrative about what's happening yet. If we want to feel the rapturous experience of being alive more often, then removing the filter of familiarity is the practice we most need to adopt.

May you receive the light of divine annunciation in the flames of your best-laid plans.

I wanted to have an honest Advent. One that actually prepared me for the coming of the Hope of the World—because I, and I believe we, need that hope more than ever.

The Voice of Giving Up is like a wandering T-Rex standing outside your bedroom window ready to devour any dreams that may be trying to see the light of day.

Any real connection involves vulnerability. Whether in marriage or friendship—or even with a stranger—a relationship can progress only so far along the normal platitudes of strength and accomplishment. It is only when we have exhausted our tales of trophy winning, when we let down our guards and speak to the truths about our travels, that we find that where we really connect as humans is in the places we have found we walk with a limp.

Vulnerability is our relationship to our weaknesses, not our weaknesses themselves. It's the feeling we have when confronted with our imperfections. The image of being vulnerable is that of taking off our armor, making ourselves available to be intimate, to be touchable. To own your vulnerabilities is a move of trust, a move of solidarity.

Renowned professor and mythologist Joseph Campbell said: "People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an *experience of being alive*, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance on our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

King David in Psalm 37 writes "Take delight in the Giver, and He will give you the desires of your heart," intimating that the secret to finding our way in the world is more about cooperating with God than appeasing God. That the Giver of life is also the Giver of our desires, which means that life has an invitational co-creative nature to it... Why do we always believe that the path of our deepest desire would be so far from the path that God would have us walk? How is the path of desire so different from the path to the Giver of that desire?

A religion based on trying to earn love inevitably fails, because works can never truly heal the fear of being left alone because of your real.

But then there is this mysterious aspect of parenting, which is to pay attention to how they have uniquely come into the world and help foster their predisposition to its fullest fruition in greater society.

Divine revelation will come to you today through unexpected avenues you’ve probably ignored.

God is bad at PR—on purpose—because the Divine has no interest in ending up on TV, being big on Instagram, having Its own line of cookware at Target. That’s too obvious.

Why do we always believe that the path of our deepest desire would be so far from the path that God would have us walk? How is the path of desire so different from the path to the Giver of that desire?

Jesus as full of grace means there wasn’t any perfection checklist that was met to deserve His presence. His arrival stands against the idea that if you do it right, you get access to His presence. His presence was freely given. He never withheld it. Grace is presence not withheld.

Our assumptions hinder our spiritual journey in all kinds of ways, and the antidote to assumption is surprise. The surprise of Christ’s incarnation is that it happened in Mary’s day as it is happening every day in your lack of resources, your overcrowded lodging, your unlit night sky, your humble surroundings.

Justin McRoberts,

an honest hope, which perhaps saves us from two unholy polarities—the empty positivity and blind optimism that masquerade as hope (yet are never honest about the realities of pain and death), or the surrender to despair and hopelessness. Honest hope is birthed in the realness in between the messy headlines of today’s news. It invites us to consider every situation, no matter how despairing, as something we don’t have to walk through alone, but as the very birthplace for divine participation.