Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World
Mike Cosper
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We're invited to pay attention to the enchanted world around us in a new way, to be open to the possibility of an encounter with God at every moment.”
“To experience the richness of life in God's kingdom, we must reorder our lives. We need to see through the shallow promises of our culture, and we need rhythms, signposts, and practices that reorient us to another world.”
“Grace is easy. Life is hard. So follow Jesus if you must, seek the face of God if you must, but don't be surprised if, after a while, it feels like you've been battling angels in the darkness. Seeking God's face in a fallen world is not the easy life; it's the good life, and a good life is always a life of worthwhile stories and worthwhile struggles.”
“Far from being invulnerable and superhuman, Jesus is truly and deeply human. He is vulnerable to hunger and weariness. He is vulnerable to fear and anxiety, as the blood, sweat, and tears of Gethsemane demonstrate. He is perfect not because he never tires of the crowd and the work of ministry but because he rightly responds to weariness, withdrawing to desolate places to rest and pray. This is the hidden ground from which his ministry arises.”
“Your daily routine has a worldview It orients your body to the world and primes you to experience in specific ways.”
“When I was a kid, I had a semi-feral tomcat that was fond of leaving animal carcasses on our front step. He was huge and grey and had long, matted fur. I’d be on my way to school and open the door to find him waiting, a bird or a squirrel or a small rabbit—often headless, by this time—in his mouth or at his feet, a look of self-satisfied pride in his eyes. One morning, I found him with the carcass of a raccoon not much smaller than he was. The cat didn’t look much better than the raccoon. His ear was torn and bleeding, and patches of fur were missing from all over his body, which was punctuated by scratches and tooth marks. I vaguely remember him missing a tooth, too. But that same dark look of pride was in his eyes. I imagined what led to that scene, something akin to a bar fight gone horribly wrong, leading him to come to his friend in the early dawn and ask for help burying the body. I got a shovel and we got rid of the raccoon together.”
“To pay attention is to attend to something, to be present. We attend because the world isn't cold and empty but filled with the presence of God. Every moment, every encounter, is meaningful and numinous. All ground is holy ground.”
“To come to live in the kingdom of God, or to seek to live in a world other than our disenchanted milieu, requires a wholesale reordering of our habits and commitments.”
“Solitude isn't an end in itself. It's rather like one-half of a breath. It's the inhale, and life in community, life among our family, neighbors, coworkers, and friends, is the exhale. It's meant to prepare us for all of life by rooting us firmly in the hiddenness that is ours in Christ, the covering of God's mercy.”
“Our clawing, grasping attempts at answering every question and making sense of every mystery in life will end up in failure. Instead, God invites us to take a tour of the mad, mad world around us, to see ourselves as one mystery among the many, and to trust him that it all makes sense in some strange, cosmic way. In doing so, we discover that the presence of mystery in the world is an invitation to wonder, and a world without mystery is a world of despair. So go ahead; embrace the mystery.”
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Book Keywords:
life-with-god, enchantment, spiritual-practices, mindfulness, holiness, mercy, spiritual-disciplines, following-jesus, pay-attention, weariness, wonder, prayer, habits, presence, rest, humanity, jesus, kingdom-of-god, solitude, grace, worldview
