Living Life In the 'Core'

Love all the questions for reflection and thought-processing on the blog, even though I don't get to it daily.

Tuesday night we asked what stood out to us from Manning's book:
**wanting to see grace all around
**having the grace to see everyone the way God sees them
**how much God loves us!!!! Yea!!
**how different our lives would be if we believed all of the above -- free from fear, from expectations, etc.

We also talked about failure somewhat. This from a journal I have:
"By avoiding failure we avoid our own humanity. But in avoiding our humanity we dodge and deny our very selves, the most precious gift God has given us.
"In view of society's attitude (towards success vs failure), failure actually may be one of the great spiritual discipines . . .However, we must be careful not to spiritualize failure because failure can crush the human spirit. . . we do well to proceed with gentleness and deep care. Failure should not be brushed aside, belittled, or trivilized [we could add glorified]. Yet failure, for all its harshness and darkness, may lead us to the light."

That same author pointed out that "Jesus failed too [we might ask ourselves how He failed] -- as people of faith we need to remember that the resurrection tosses out all standard expectations and measurements of failure and success (neither is inherently good or evil)."

Love you all -- Kathy
I would appreciate your prayers -- I am stressed, and that's not usual for me!