Best 10 quotes of Mike Cosper on MyQuotes

All human creativity is an echo of God’s creativity. When God makes man, he forms him in the dirt, breathes life into him, and sends him out in the world. We’ve been playing in the dirt ever since. Just as God took something he’d made, shaped it, breathed life and meaning into it, and transformed it into something new, so we set about our own business, taking creation, shaping it, and giving it new meaning and purpose. Clay becomes sculpture. Trees become houses. Sounds are arranged in time to become music. Oils, pigments, and canvas are arranged to become paintings. Various metals, glass, and petroleum products become iPhones. The same is true of stories. There is nothing new under the sun, and our stories—no matter how fresh and new they might feel—are all a way of “playing in the dirt,” wrestling with creation, reimagining it, working with it, and making it new. Our stories have a way of fitting into the bigger story of redemption that overshadows all of life and all of history. Because that bigger story is the dirt box in which all the other stories play.

Each moment of our days--our meals, our conversations with friends, our escapes, obsessions, romances, and distractions--is what we make of our lives. Our habits and rhythms of life are formative not only of who we are but how we know the world, including whether we know it to be a place where God is present or absent.

Far from being invulnerable and superhuman, Jesus is truly and deeply human. He is vulnerable to hunger and weariness. He is vulnerable to fear and anxiety, as the blood, sweat, and tears of Gethsemane demonstrate. He is perfect not because he never tires of the crowd and the work of ministry but because he rightly responds to weariness, withdrawing to desolate places to rest and pray. This is the hidden ground from which his ministry arises.

Grace is easy. Life is hard. So follow Jesus if you must, seek the face of God if you must, but don't be surprised if, after a while, it feels like you've been battling angels in the darkness. Seeking God's face in a fallen world is not the easy life; it's the good life, and a good life is always a life of worthwhile stories and worthwhile struggles.

Our clawing, grasping attempts at answering every question and making sense of every mystery in life will end up in failure. Instead, God invites us to take a tour of the mad, mad world around us, to see ourselves as one mystery among the many, and to trust him that it all makes sense in some strange, cosmic way. In doing so, we discover that the presence of mystery in the world is an invitation to wonder, and a world without mystery is a world of despair. So go ahead; embrace the mystery.

Solitude isn't an end in itself. It's rather like one-half of a breath. It's the inhale, and life in community, life among our family, neighbors, coworkers, and friends, is the exhale. It's meant to prepare us for all of life by rooting us firmly in the hiddenness that is ours in Christ, the covering of God's mercy.

To come to live in the kingdom of God, or to seek to live in a world other than our disenchanted milieu, requires a wholesale reordering of our habits and commitments.

To experience the richness of life in God's kingdom, we must reorder our lives. We need to see through the shallow promises of our culture, and we need rhythms, signposts, and practices that reorient us to another world.

To pay attention is to attend to something, to be present. We attend because the world isn't cold and empty but filled with the presence of God. Every moment, every encounter, is meaningful and numinous. All ground is holy ground.

We're invited to pay attention to the enchanted world around us in a new way, to be open to the possibility of an encounter with God at every moment.