And why is it so important to act strong? I have been graced with the strength to endure. But I have been assaulted, and in the assault wounded, grievously wounded. Am I to pretend otherwise? Wounds are ugly, I know. They repel. But must they always be swathed? I shall look at the world through tears. Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not.

— Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son

The sacralization of the political is a reality parallel to developments in our churches: we’ve blurred the line between patriotism and faithful Christian practice, we’ve allowed church services to take on nationalistic dimensions, and we’ve elevated the nation to the level of loyalty the church alone should occupy.

— Kaitlyn Schiess

In our western world, we live in a culture that stresses the importance and significance of the individual, while at the same time downplaying the importance of God. These two emphases, the significance of the individual life and the absence of God, cannot go together without creating an intolerable restlessness inside each of us.

— Ronald Rolheiser

For many people, God is simply a gauze applied to the wound of not knowing, when in fact that wound has bled into every part of the world, is bleeding now in a way that is life if we acknowledge it, death if we don’t. Christ is contingency. Christ’s life is right now.

— Christian Wiman

Plenty of leaders know of the Iceberg Principle, and you do not have to understand this theory to get the point. The majority of our emotions, values, meaning, or disagreement lies under the surface. It’s up to us to mine the depths of who we are to find how they impact us in our daily interactions. However, I am becoming increasingly aware that what is rewarded in our culture is very rarely the depths of our being, but rather, the tip of the iceberg.

I found myself listening to a guided meditation while walking along the track at Nicholas Ball Park early in the morning a few weeks ago when I realized something that I do not believe to be singular to myself. Part of the meditation was to awaken your senses by using them, and noticing God’s creation and the speaker urged me to reach out and touch my surroundings. Though my contemplative nature usually compels me to “stop and smell the roses,” it took me a moment to warm up to the idea of reaching out to brush my hands against the leaves of a nearby tree. I wanted to keep moving. I wanted to accomplish my goal of finding joy that morning, as it is hard to come by in our current cultural landscape.