My Commonplace Book

Michael Reeves said, “Joy always comes through encountering beauty, and in Christ is found the highest beauty.”

Bessel Van der Kolk said, “One thing is certain: Yelling at someone who is already out of control can only lead to further dysregulation…”

Blaise Pascal mused on our inability to live in and enjoy the present: “We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight…”

Lesslie Newbigin said, “The business of the church is to tell and to embody a story, the story of God’s mighty acts in creation and redemption and of God’s promises concerning what will be in the end…”

Matthew LaPine said, “The problem with not distinguishing higher from lower appetite is that a person must identify deviant emotion as volitional, and therefore subject to the same sort of moral censure as a deliberate, external act…”

"Martirosyan and her colleagues spend three years investigating a case before relinquishing the deceased to a communal gravesite, a last resort in the county cemetery."

Elaine Scarry said, “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharablity through its resistance to language.”

Healing from an anxiety disorder is less about making anxious feelings go away and more about learning to tolerate them.

The season of Advent, a season of waiting, is designed to cultivate our awareness of God’s actions—past, present, and future.

In God’s Prayer Book: The Power and Pleasure of Praying the Psalms, Ben Patterson offers five suggestions for praying the Psalms.

John Stott said, “in every well-constructed worship service the pendulum should swing rhythmically between God addressing his people through Scripture and his people responding to him in confession, faith, adoration, or prayer.”

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen said, “Pain is an ocean with no sign of land. You look around in every direction and find nothing but more pain, as far as the eye can see.”

Rabbi David Wolpe said, “The stories of the Torah, read year after year, wear grooves in our souls…”

Esau McCaulley said, “Our national tendency to see only the best of America was standing in the way of truly becoming great. [Frederick Douglass] thought enough of this country to tell it the truth. We would be better off if more of us did the same.”

Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist, describes anxiety as a “conscious feeling” originating in the brain.

Nicolas Wolterstorff said, “Grief is existential testimony to the worth of the one loved.”