I love it when God gives just the right book to read at just the right time. Just one of His many kindnesses to me lately. I've been a big fan of Brennan Manning for a long time - and have known about "Abba's Child" for a while...but haven't ever read it (though I've recommended it to others...that's risky business: recommending what you haven't read! but I believe in Manning that much!).
And what a delight it has been. What a gift to be reminded of my place as His beloved.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the first 3 chapters...all are from Manning unless otherwise noted.
Chapter 1
We cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves - unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely.
When I relapsed, I had two options: yield once again to guilt, fear and depression; or rush into the arms of my heavenly Father - choose to live as a victim of my disease; or choose to trust in Abba's immutable love.
Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon. - Thomas Merton
...acknowledge out utter nothingness before him.
They are more displeased with their own shortcomings than they would ever dream of being with someone else's they are sick of their own mediocrity and disgusted by their own inconsistency.
Being the beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence. -Henri Nouwen
We learn to be gentle with ourselves by experiencing the intimate, heartfelt compassion of Jesus. To the extent that we allow the relentless tenderness of Jesus to invade the citadel of self, we are freed from dyspepsia toward ourselves, Christ wants us to alter our attitude toward ourselves and take sides with Him against our own self-evaluation.
If I make anything out of the fact that I am Thomas Merton, I am dead. And if you make anything out of the fact that you are in charge of the pig barn, you are dead. Quit keeping score altogether and surrender yourself with all your sinfulness to God who sees neither the score nor the scorekeeper but only His child redeemed by Christ. - Thomas Merton
dare to live as forgiven men and women
Chapter 2
His heart is buried with Christ in the Father's love...
We are made for God, and nothing less will really satisfy us.
Prayer is essentially...the breathing of our own deepest request to be united with God as fully as possible. - Jeffrey Imbach
Whatever is denied cannot be healed.
Come to grips with our selfishness and stupidity...
The art of gentleness toward ourselves leads to being gentle with others...
You belong to Me and no one will tear you from My hand.
The longer you spend time in the presence of Jesus, the more accustomed you grow to His face, the less adulation you will need because you will have discovered for yourself that He is Enough. And in the Presence, you will delight in the discovery of what it means to live by grace and not by performance.
Chapter 3
...the highest spiritual development was to be ordinary...
...the story of an ordinary man whose soul was seduced and ravished by Jesus Christ.
Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. God's love for you and his choice of you constitute your worth. Accept that, and let it become the most important thing in your life.
Encounter God in the ordinariness....in our simple presence in life.
You are the beloved, and all I hope is that you can hear these words as spoken to you with all the tenderness and force that love can hold. - Henri Nouwen
The indispensable condition for developing and maintaining the awareness of our belovedness is time alone with God. In solitude we turn out the nay-saying whisper of our worthlessness and sink down into the mystery of our true self.
Our identity rests in God's relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ.
...in my brokenness, in my powerlessness, in my weakness that Jesus was made strong.
At certain times in our lives, we made an adjustment in the course of our lives. This was one of those time for me. If you were to look at a map of my life, you would not be aware of any noticeable difference other than a slight change in direction.
...an ordinary evangelical man who had encountered the God of ordinary people. The God who grabs scalawags and ragamuffins by the scruff of the neck and raises them up to seat them with the princes and princesses of His people.
Has the thunder of "God loved the world so much" been so muffled by the roar of religious rhetoric that we are deaf to the word that God could have tender feelings for us?
...being alone with the Alone, experiencing the transcendent Other and growing in awareness of one's identity as the beloved...
Failure to recognize the value of mere being with God, as the beloved, without doing anything, is to gouge the heart out of Christianity. -Edward Schillebeechx
