hotels.com

Tag: quote

Sometimes I pray aloud, and the outward expression matches the inner truth. But too often, I’m the actress and prayer is my stage. I’m too aware of myself, too aware of everyone else’s response.

– Micha Boyett in Found p.130

“Lord,” I say, “I am not ironing and mopping because I have nothing better to do. I am ironing and mopping because I get to take care of some people who deserve to be taken care of.”

– Micha Boyett in Found p.113

Leaving often masquerades as the more courageous choice. But in reality it’s often easier to leave a relationship than to pursue it despite the difficulty. Stability demands forgiveness, discomfort and, often, a sacrifice of the more interesting, more exciting possibility. Stability is brave.

– Micha Boyett in Found p.68

“Well, [the Psalms are] complicated. There’s a lot of praise and thanksgiving and all the things you’re supposed to expect from a book of songs written to God. But then there’s also all this rage and passion and doubt mixed in with the praise.” I stop for a second to form my words the way I want to. I push the swing. “I’ve just been thinking how sometimes the rage and passion and worship are all in me too. I’m complicated the same way, you know? Capable of holding faith and anger, hope and doubt, all at the same time.”

– Micha Boyett in Found p.28

“What if those two people in my bed, those two gifts in my life, are not the people who keep me from prayer? What if they’re the actual prayers I’m praying?” I cry when I say this. I always have a hard time processing things out loud. My tears are inevitably connected to my voice, even among these strangers from Pasadena. Brother Michael is thrilled by my thought. He immediately chimes in, “Yes! Yes, Micha!” Then he compares me to the Virgin Mother. Shocked at his own insight, his voice rises as he realizes, “Christ was her prayer!”

– Micha Boyett in Found p.15

I am a sometimes-believer, in love with Jesus. I am a mystic who can’t grip tight enough to the mystical. I long for order but can hardly make a list. I need something ancient, not ruled by the culture that rules me, to tell me what to do when my boy is throwing a tantrum on the plane – thirty minutes of uncontrolled screaming, leaving bite marks on my neck to remember it by. I need to know how to love God when all I have to offer is my daily chaos. Mostly, I long to know a quietness in my soul, true contentment, despite my spiritual unimpressiveness. I need to believe that my simple life really is a gift and really can be hold.

– Micha Boyett in Found p. 8

These ways of marriage, kinship, friendship, and neighborhood surround us with forbiddings; they are forms of bondage, and involved in our humanity is always the wish to escape … But involved in our humanity also is the warning that we can escape only into loneliness and meaninglessness.

– Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace | Men and Women in Search of Common Ground p.141