Warm Fuzzies

Have you ever had a warm fuzzy? You know, that feeling when your heart melts and a smile blooms across your face without any effort? Whenever I pick up this book I'm reading I get the warm fuzzies......"The Rest Of God; Restoring Your Soul By Restoring Sabbath" by Mark Buchanan. If not warm fuzzies, I get frequent "aha" moments. True evidence that there is much truth and the Holy spirit speaking through the book. The author articulates in a clever manner...and at times he explains a point with a winded story; it's been entertaining. So thank you Jennifer (from work) for letting me borrow this book to read.



Here are some warm fuzzies and aha's that I'll share with you:

• In a culture where busyness is a fetish and stillness is laziness, rest is sloth. But without rest, we miss the rest of God; "Be still, and know that I am God." (Ps. 46:10)


• A typical response to threat and burden is to want to flee it, but flight becomes captivity. God's solution is that he offers rest. To rest in him in the midst of our threats and our burdens. God is our rock and our refuge right in the thick of our situation.


• Make it your ambition...to work with your hands, just as we told you"; "We gave you this rule: ;If a man will not work, he shall not eat'" (Thess. 4:11; 2 Thess. 3:10)


• The opposite of a slave is not a free man. It's a worshiper. The one who is most free is the one who turns the work of his hands into sacrament, into offering.


• Next tine you're tempted to complain about your work, praise God for it instead. Next time you open your mouth to gossip about people; pray for them, thank God for them, find the good in them.


• nothing really changes until our minds do


• This is the gift of God: to experience the sacred amidst the commonplace-to taste heaven in our daily bread, a new heaven and new earth in a mouthful of wine, joy in the ache of our muscles or the sweat of our brows.


• The Chinese join two characters to form a single pictograph for busyness: heart and killing. The heart is the place the busy life exacts its steepest toll.


• He makes me lie down in green pastures. Psalm 23. If we don't choose to lie down, God sometimes makes us. Such as we continue to ignore the rest and continue the busyness, and then God makes us lie down; whether we like it or not, we come down with some type of ailment.


• The essence of a Sabbath heart: paying attention. It is being fully present, wholly awaken in each moment.


• Those who train themselves in God's goodness should discover that every year you grow, you find him bigger.


• Life does not consist of the abundance of our possessions, it is to notice, to pay attention to the time of God.


• In God's economy, to redeem time, you might just have to waste some.


• Put your hand to the task, Martha-like, and do it with all your heart, Mary-like.

So anyways, just wanted to share what I've been reading lately and the thought-provoking material it is providing.........