Sermon quotes on baggage
Billy Collins
This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore…. Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack here and pitches his ragged tent.
“Aristotle,” Picnic Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998)
Ed Cyzewski
It’s hard to see, but sometimes the greatest barriers to our spiritual growth and flourishing are the things we’re already carrying or that we assume are essential. We may have picked them up on our own, or others may have placed them on us.
“Spiritual Baggage: Do You Need to Get Rid of It?” Christians for Social Action (2019)
Victor Hugo
What’s our baggage? Only vows,
Happiness, and all our care,
And the flower that sweetly shows
Nestling lightly in your hair.
“A Little Music,” Selections Chiefly Lyrical from the Poetical Works of Victor Hugo, ed. Henry L. Williams (G. Bell & Sons, 1911).
Mick Jagger
You gotta give up to get what you want.
Carl Jung
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
C, Sreechinth, Musings of Carl Jung (Roosevelt, UT: UB Tech, 2018), 41.
John C. Maxwell
To move forward today, you must learn to say good-bye to yesterday’s hurts, tragedies and baggage. You can’t build a monument to past problems and fail forward.
Failing Forward, Harper Collins, 2007, p.78.
George S. Merriam
When your burden is heaviest, you can always lighten a little some other burden. At the times when you cannot see God, there is still open to you this sacred possibility, to show God; for it is the love and kindness of human hearts through which the divine reality comes home to men, whether they name it or not. Let this thought, then, stay with you: there may be times when you cannot find help, but there is no time when you cannot give help.
“The Unfailing Resource,” The Way of Life (Geo. H. Ellis, 1882)
C.F.D. Moule
St. Paul rejoices that his sufferings help to complete what is lacking of afflictions of Christ. This seems to mean two things. First that the Christian’s suffering (in this case the Apostle’s) are a share in Christ’s sufferings because the Christian and Christ are somehow connected.
The Sacrifice of Christ
Seneca the Elder
No man can swim ashore and take his baggage with him.
Epistle 22, “On the Futility of Half-Way Measures,” Epistles (Harvard, 1917)
Roger J. Burdette
It is not the experience of today that drives us mad; it is the remorse or bitterness for something which happened yesterday.
Rick Steves
You’ll never meet a traveler who, after five trips, brags: “Every year I pack heavier.” The measure of a good traveler is how light he or she travels.
Marcus Mincius Felix
And so it is that when a man walks along a road, the lighter he travels, the happier he is; equally, on this journey of life, a man is more blessed if he does not pant beneath a burden of riches.
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