Geoffrey Wood Quotes - Page 5

If we blind them to The Adversary - decrease their desire for The Desire - while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing “freedom of choice,” then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.

Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins.

Also, always encourage 'being good' over 'doing good.' Acts of goodness are the difficulty for us and should, of course, be avoided. 'Being good' is far less problematic, largely because it lacks definition and can be solely a state of mind completely unattached to reality.

Without God, reality is madness. Reason will tell you so. You either madly trust in God, or you trust in a world gone mad without him.

Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.

If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He’s going to ask you what you bought.

If God’s suggesting that I am expected to do good and also obligated to manufacture a genuine desire for it, this boat’s sunk, still sitting on the trailer in the driveway. A stack of things need to happen before I desire to be good…

Trust is crazy. You are a risky, risky, God. I didn’t sign up to be Amazing Trust Boy, and I did not sign up for Danger God. You’re flatly not safe…

Trust becomes the only road home, back to love.

You don’t change the world by telling it what to do, sitting at home, and telling it what you believe. You believe by throwing yourself into it. Making a leap, getting involved, then waiting, taking some one person’s place for a while, one suffering person at a time.

God didn’t give Moses ten fortune cookies in a to-go box. God didn’t lead the Israelites through the wilderness with a neon all-you-can-eat sign. And God doesn’t speak to people in bathrooms, public or otherwise.

It was like magic, but so much of magic is about misdirection, whereas so much of redemption is straightforward and ordinary, piercing true and lit with surprise.

When everything all in a moment comes together, surprisingly perfect, it doesn’t prove there’s a loving God; but if there is, isn’t it perfect when all in a moment, God proves how surprisingly He loves?

I say “illusion” of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing.

As a rule, Americans are big on that word “choice” and some souls can be captured simply by dangling before the creature a continual, lifelong supply of things from which to choose.

The Americans’ great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.

The Americans want a surplus stocked up to supply their every whim. And their appeals are much less requests, more demands. Indeed, the phrase might be more aptly put: Demand and Surplus.