life on planet earth on Cruciform Life

All my life I was taught how to die as a Christian, but no one ever taught me how I ought to live in the years before I die.

Gaining spiritual life is conditional on suffering loss. We cannot measure our lives in terms of "gain"; they must be measured in terms of "loss." Our real capacity lies not in how...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the reality of what it means to “take up our cross” in our daily lives: Sometimes we suffer u...

There’s an aphorism repeated often in the writings of the medieval church: per crucem ad lucem, through the cross to the light. God loves us passionately and wants to bring us joy and flourishing, but...

We want gain without pain; we want the resurrection without going through the grave; we want life without experiencing death; we want a crown without going by way of the Cross. But in God's econom...

Please know that when I take up my cross every day I am not talking about my wheelchair. My wheelchair is not my cross to bear. Neither is your cane or walker your cross. Neither is your dead-end job ...

All God's plans have the mark of the cross on them, and all His plans have death to self in them.

In his book of the same name, seminary professor Andrew Purves describes the centrality of the cross as it relates to ministry: When I speak at conferences about the crucifixion of ministry, ministe...

But when the cross is working deeply a believer comes to know himself. He realizes how undependable are his ideas, feelings and desires.

Exposed to public view like slabs of meat hung from a market stall, troublesome slaves were nailed to crosses…past. No death was more excruciating, more contemptible, than crucifixion. To be hung nake...

The caterpillar must yield up the life it knows and submit to the mystery of interior transformation. It emerges from the process transfigured, with wings that give it freedom to fly. . .. A rule of lif...

Cross-bearing is the long lesson of our mortal life. It is a part of God’s salvation, called sanctification. It is a lesson set before us every moment of every day.” “If life were an art lesson…we cou...

Daily life becomes a discipline of asking how one may move more squarely into the realm of God’s reign and how one may welcome and receive it into the fabric of one’s life this day more than ever befo...

Jesus, the hero of the world’s most well-known spiritual narrative, offers us a mysteriously clear path to the good life: “Anyone who doesn’t pick up their cross and follow after me doesn’t deserve me...

Thus a Christian finds himself called to drab and lowly tasks, which seem less remarkable than monastic life, mortifications, and other distractions from our vocations. For him who heeds his vocation,...

All of us share in what D. Elton Trueblood calls “the common ventures of life”—birth, marriage, work, death. Jesus, in his life and in his teaching, gave sacramental significance to these ordinary exp...

The Christian life is a great paradox. Those who die to self, find self. Those who die to their cravings will receive many times as much in this age, and, in the age to come, eternal life (Luke 18:29)...

The Christian life is not a life dripping with personal satisfaction or one of basking in feeling “positive.” It isn’t a life baptized in stimulation or excitement. It definitely isn’t a life of conse...

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we...

Thus the vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, ...

Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service. Don’t be conformed to this world, bu...

Carrying the cross does mean following in Jesus' footsteps. And in His footsteps are rejection, brokenheartedness, persecution and death. There are not two Christs - an easy going one for easy goi...

The Christian life is the life of Jesus Christ fleshed out in our lives—yours and mine—through the power of the Holy Spirit.

For over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living. . . . Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasin...

The life of faith isn't meant for tourists. It's meant for pilgrims.

Jesus reveals in an exceptionally human life what it is to live a divine life, a compassionate life.

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, dest...

May we offer our whole lives as living sacrifices, breaking our comforts and pouring out our whole lives as pure nard unto our Savior.

The Christian life depends the single personality from the collective, not by isolating him but by giving him the status of an organ in the mystical body.

When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary.