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It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is.

Eugene H. Peterson

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Eugene H. Peterson
Age: 85 †
Born: 1932
Born: November 6
Died: 2018
Died: October 22
Author
Bible Translator
Theologian
Translator
University Teacher
Stanwood
Washington
Work
Companionship
Guides
Direction
Easier
Spiritual
Tell
Someone
Prayerful
Find
Discerning

More quotes by Eugene H. Peterson

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There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.
Eugene H. Peterson
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The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God's creative genius is endless.
Eugene H. Peterson
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When you are part of a megachurch you have no responsibility to anybody else.
Eugene H. Peterson
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Prayer gets us in on what God is doing.
Eugene H. Peterson
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Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner.
Eugene H. Peterson
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Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God it whets our appetite.
Eugene H. Peterson
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It's essential for us to develop an imagination that is participatory. Art is the primary way in which this happens. It's the primary way in which we become what we see or hear.
Eugene H. Peterson
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Jesus almost never talked in terms of explaining. He was always using enigmatic stories and difficult metaphors. He was always pulling people into some kind of participation.
Eugene H. Peterson
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Exile (being where we don't want to be with people we don't want to be with) forces a decision: Will I focus my attention on what is wrong with the world and feel sorry for myself? Or will I focus my energies on how I can live at my best in this place I find myself?...'I will do my best with what is here.'
Eugene H. Peterson
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We cannot be too careful about the words we use we start out using them and they end up using us.
Eugene H. Peterson
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Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.
Eugene H. Peterson
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Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings self-pity is possibly the most ignoble . . . . [It] is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality . . . a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict.
Eugene H. Peterson
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I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.
Eugene H. Peterson
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Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.
Eugene H. Peterson
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I believe God takes the things in our lives - family, background, education - and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don't think God wastes anything.
Eugene H. Peterson
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The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has a time of harvest. All suffering, pain, emptiness, disappointment is seed: sow it in God and He will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.
Eugene H. Peterson
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The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the ...moment.
Eugene H. Peterson
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You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.
Eugene H. Peterson
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If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life.
Eugene H. Peterson
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Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.
Eugene H. Peterson