It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again—but now on a new level. Three

Paradoxically, your loyal soldier gives you so much security and validation that you may confuse his voice with the very voice of God. If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God.

but very few Christians have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time. Our Western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well. Without a contemplative mind, we do not know how to hold creative tensions. We are better at rushing to judgment and demanding a complete resolution to things before we have learned what they

The cross exposes forever the “scene of our crime.”

The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently.

They tend to reveal the shadow and mysterious side of things. Such constant exceptions make us revisit the so-called rule and what we call normal—and recalibrate! The exceptions keep us humble and searching, and not rushing toward resolution to allay our anxiety.

He is to carry the oar, which was his “delivery system” as one who journeyed by ship in his first life.

As St. Gregory of Nyssa already said in the fourth century, “Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”

Just remember this much consciously: the whole story is set in the matrix of seeking to find home and then to return there, and thus refining and defining what home really is.