Advent 3 2015 03 Wednesday

  

<I invite each of us to expect more of ourselves. Yet as I think about happiness, I keep running up against paradoxes: I want to change myself but I need to accept myself. I want to take myself less seriously, but also more seriously. I want to use my time well, but I really want to wander, to play, to read at whim. I want to think about myself so that I can forget myself. Because I am always on the edge of agitation, I want to let go of envy and anxiety about the future, yet keep my energy and ambition.>
― Gretchen Rubin.

 As Voltaire quoted an Italian aphorism,

"Don't let perfection be the enemy of good." 

Advent 1 2015 03 Wednesday

<One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God’s arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is God’s grace that gives us that faith. As with all spiritual knowledge, two things are true, and equally true, at once. The mind can’t grasp paradox; it is the secret knowledge of the soul. - Michelle Blake, The Tentmaker>