Just sharing some excerpts from the book Love Beyond Reason (Moving God's love from your Head to your Heart):
1. It may be a very bad thing that I needed God to die for me, but it's a wonderful thing that God thinks I'm worth dying for.
2. The main place you do the work of God is as you go along. It doesn't have to be in high-profile, important positions. It will happen, if it happens at all, in the routine, unspectacular corners of your life. As you go along. (Jesus noticed a blind man as he was walking along).
3. What is the work of God? It is simply to see what Jesus would see if he were looking through my eyes, and respond as he would respond.
4. The first task in spiritual life,..is simply this: to pay attention to God. This is challenging enough, considering the difficulty we have paying attention to anyone. Add to that the challenge of attending to a holy, mysterious, invisible God, and always our sin will attempt to distract us. We all have a kind of spiritual attention deficit disorder.
5. "But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.." Weaning means learning to live in stillness with unfulfilled desires.
6. If you want to do the work of God, pay attention to people. Notice them. Especially notice the people nobody else notices..God has numbered every hair. If one falls out, He notices. When we live in the love of God, we begin to pay attention to people the way God pays attention to us.
7. One of the most important diagnostic questions I can ask myself is "Am I becoming more or less approachable?" How available am I to the people in my little world? Can my spouse say anything to me? Do I sometimes pause to put a hand on the shoulder of the people I work with, just to let them know I'm glad they're there? Am I getting better at listening to people without judging them?
8. Be so filled with the life of Jesus that in touching the world, instead of its infecting us, we infect it..those who have been touched by Jesus have gone out spreading germs. Little joy germs, faith germs, belief bacteria.
9. The Bible says the place where God's unswerving commitment to justice and God's undying longing to forgive meet is the cross. The cross is the declaration of God's hatred of sin and all the damage sin does. The cross is the declaration of God's love for sinners and his insatiable appetite to redeem them.
10. God's hope is that we will stop searching for infinite satisfaction from finite objects. His hope is that frustration will once more cause the prodigal son to stop rooting around in the pit trough and return to the father. Frustration in this sense is a kind of gift. It is one of the forms God's love takes for people who might otherwise throw their lives away on trivial pursuits.
11. Any time you see a bird nibble some seeds you ate watching Love himself at work. Every time you wake up, think a thought, enjoy a meal, these are not random occurrences. They are Post-It notes of love that the Father keeps attaching to all creation, in the hopes that someone will read them.
