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“We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Optimism and hope are radically different attitudes. Optimism is the expectation of things—the weather, human relationships, the economy, the political situation, and so on—will get better. Hope is trust that God will fulfill God’s promises to us in a way that leads us to true freedom.”
—Henri Nouwen
“If I were sitting on the end of the pier on a summer day enjoying the sunshine and the air, and someone came along and jumped into the water and got drowned ‘to prove his love for me’,I should find it quite unintelligible. I might be much in need of love, but an act in no rational relation to any of my necessities could not prove it. But if I had fallen over the pier and were drowning, and someone sprang into the water, and at the cost of making my peril, or what but for him would be my fate, his own, save me from death, then I should say, ‘Greater love hath no man than this.’ I should say it intelligibly, because there would be an intelligent relation between the sacrifice which love made and the necessity from which it redeemed.”
— James Dennon, The Death of Christ