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Mark Buchanan

Mark Buchanan Quotes

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Famous Mark Buchanan Quotes

“In the winter of the heart...we experience a wide gap between what we know of God and what we taste and see of God. Our theology says one thing - God is loving, faithful, righteous, bestowing wonders. But our experience says another - that he's aloof, angry, capricious, dealing bruises. And we feel deeply alone; even when we're with others, we're estranged from them. Sadness is a room we can't find the door out of. And worst of all, we feel the encroachment of death. Everything looks dead. We feel dead. Sometimes we wish we were dead. But Christ, the Man for All Seasons, meets us even here, in the depth of our wintertime. He waits with us. He prunes us. He breaks our self-dependency and deepens our God-dependency. He brings us into a fresh encounter with the God who raises the dead. And always, the Man for All Seasons leads us out of winter.”

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Book:Spiritual Rhythm: Being with Jesus Every Season of Your Soul
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“...this book germinated in a dark season. It started not on some Norwegian height but in a deep and lonely valley. A winter, is how I describe it. I am not, now that I've been there, fool enough to romanticize that place and season. I am not masochistic enough to wish its return. But all the same, I met Christ there in ways I hadn't before. I stumbled into the fellowship of sharing in Christ's sufferings, as Paul calls it, and until I'd joined that fellowship I had no idea, really, what he was talking about. I'm not sure I know now. But what I do know is that Jesus is enough. He has been a good companion all the way through. I have no reason to doubt he will be a good companion for all that lies ahead. I hope there are still many springs and summers and autumns for me. I know other winters will come, and at some point settle in. Alas and amen. Too bad and so be it. The Man for All Seasons is here, and there. With him by my side, all is well, and all manner of things are well.”

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Book:Spiritual Rhythm: Being with Jesus Every Season of Your Soul
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“Springtime brings the consolation of hope. It gives the assurance that death has lost its sting. There is beauty in this hope and this assurance. There is beauty in the woman whose chemo-induced baldness, unswaddled, shines like a pearl, in the man whose palsy makes him shimmy like a Spanish dancer. There is beauty in their defiance and their acceptance. There is beauty in their standing in the hope that death can't steal or destroy.”

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Book:Spiritual Rhythm: Being with Jesus Every Season of Your Soul
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“...waiting builds faith's backbone. The waiting is necessary to cultivate a faith to die for and live for, a faith that will literally change the world. Waiting is necessary for faith in the same way a chrysalis is necessary for a caterpillar, to change it from a grub that crawls the earth to a butterfly that dances the air. Many of Jesus' disciples, then as now, would die for their faith. That kind of faith isn't grown in a week. And, mostly, it's not grown in warmth and sunshine. Miracles can take it only so far, and after that can actually stunt it. Its hardiest growth, where the roots get deep and tough, happens in darkness. In winter.”

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Book:Spiritual Rhythm: Being with Jesus Every Season of Your Soul
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“There is too wide a gap, for most of us, between what we say and what we mean. Between our words and our thoughts. The first thing the Prophet Isaiah said when he saw the living and exalted God was, “Woe is me, I am ruined. For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). Isaiah was one of the most godly men who ever walked the earth. But seeing God, he sees also, abrupt and stark and grief-making, his own duplicity. Then God does what only God can do: he sears his lips clean (Isaiah 6:6-7). And herein lies our hope: truly seeing God, we truly see ourselves, in all our woe-begotten duplicity; but crying out to God, we are truly and greatly helped.”

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Author:Mark Buchanan
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“Winter's not for adding things but for cutting things. It's the best season, the safest one, actually, to look closely at all the tangled branches of your life - the travel, the committee work, the various projects, the hobbies that have become burdens or obsessions, the trivial pursuits, the diversions; or the ingrown snarl of things, the lists in your head of people and situations to worry about, the proliferation of responsibilities that aren't really yours - and ask honestly if these are bearing fruit or just sapping energy. And then, without apology or even caution, cut to nothing all that which gives nothing.”

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Book:Spiritual Rhythm: Being with Jesus Every Season of Your Soul
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“And then God gave me insight: this was winter. It would end, in time, but not by my own doing. My responsibility was simply to know the season, and match my actions and inactions to it. It was to learn the slow hard discipline of waiting. It was my season to believe in spite of-to believe in the absence of evidence or emotion, when there's nothing, no bud, no color, no light, no birdsong, to validate belief. It was my time to walk without sight.”

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Author:Mark Buchanan
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“Once we begin to flee the things that threaten and burden us, there is no end to fleeing. God's solution is surprising. He offers rest. But it's a unique form of rest. It's to rest in him in the midst of our threats and our burdens. It's discovering, as David did in seasons of distress, that God is our rock and refuge right in the thick of our situation.”

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Author:Mark Buchanan
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“The examen is a form of personal inventory. At day’s end, spend time in prayerful reflection on your day: your comings and goings, routines and disruptions, work and play, discoveries and disappointments. Think about who you met, or missed. Think about your moments of aloneness. In all, ask two questions: when was I most alive, most present, most filled and fulfilled today? And when was I most taxed, stressed, distracted, depleted today? A simpler, and more spiritually focused, version of those questions: when did I feel closest to God, and when farthest?”

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Author:Mark Buchanan
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