life on planet earth on Indispensability

My instructor in Sabbath-keeping was not a professor or spiritual director, but a foreman at the East Chicago Inland Steel plant named Mike Paddock. His wife was the treasurer of the tiny congregation...

The Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst once offered columnist Arthur Brisbane a six-month vacation with full pay as a reward for his dedicated and successful work. Brisbane ultimately turned dow...

Many of us struggle to know exactly what to pack when we go on our various travels. The Pilgrims in their voyage to the new world were no different. As Bill Bryson describes in his book Made in Americ...

The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living a...

Brokenness is God’s requirement for maximum usefulness.

You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

You aren't alive if you aren't in need.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

The doctrine of our time is that man can't get along without a whole hell of a lot of stuff. You may not be preaching it, but you're living treason.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have r...

You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

Our infinite obligations to God do not fill our hearts half as much as a petty uneasiness of our own; nor His infinite perfections as much as our smallest wants.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.

Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences.

It is only when you reach the very bottom, when everything falls apart, when all your schemes and resources are broken and exhausted, that you are finally open to learning how to completely depend on ...

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

Cosmic ingratitude is living in the illusion that you are spiritually self-sufficient. It is taking credit for something that was a gift. It is the belief that you know best how to live, that you have...

Here is an eternal truth. Life cannot be divided into compartments in some which God is involved and in others of which he is not involved... The fact is that God does not need to be invited into cert...

You might know that I put my personal cell phone number in the back of a couple of books I wrote. When I told my publisher what I wanted to do, they said, “Are you crazy?!” I thought for a minute and ...

A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist! "However" replied the universe ‘The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”

Because our consumption can take us anywhere, we are nowhere in particular.

Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our ...

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Great needs grow from great possessions.

Work is as much a basic human need as food, beauty, rest, friendship, prayer, and sexuality; it is not simply medicine but food.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

This moment is God’s irreplaceable gift to you.

The other thing that helps me deal with my compulsion to control things through my direct involvement and my fear of missing out is what Henri Nouwen has called “the ministry of absence.” Jesus modele...

Needs are not bad. If God is sovereign and the “first good” comes before sin invades the world, then why did God wait to create the woman until later? In my mind, there can be only one rationale: God ...