Book Reading: Recapture The Wonder

Recapture the Wonder is a book authored by Ravi Zacharias. He's faced a controversy quite recently, being accused of having an inappropriate electronic communication he privately had with a married female. It's been resolved and nothing was proven to judge him guilty.

Here are some good insights from the book:

• Attainment and fulfillment are not the same.
• There is  in man that seeks a state of mind that attainments can never fill.
• The greatest pursuit of every life is often traded for something less, something daily.
• Tragedy is the absence of God in the human experience.
• A child gives reason and emotion its due and still seeks for wonder...childlike sight and faith....
• Wonder is that possession of the mind that enchants the emotions while never surrendering to reason.
• Wonder is a grasp on reality that does not need constant high points in order to be maintained, nor is it made vulnerable by the low points of life's struggles.
• Wonder sees the the ordinary in the extraordinary, and finds in the extraordinary the reaffirmations for what it already knows.
• Wonder interprets life through the eyes of eternity while enjoying the moment, but never lets the momentary vision exhaust the eternal.
• God grants us the means so that we can not only cope with life but so we can celebrate and enjoy life.
• Many times some retracting is needed before you will start to make progress. and just like missing an exit, you'd need to drive further  distance before you can turn around to head in the right direction.
• Assuming privileges right from the beginning without first exercising the work ethic that they have resulted from is more hazardous for the individual than it is a blessing.
• In the 70s kids lost their love， they learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.
• The noblest reason is to know God Himself (quoting from Phil 3 and  Gk Chesterton)
• Seeking new sensations while violating the sacred first desecrates the self and finally destroys the sensation.
• Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character. Oscar Wilde
• It is foolish to obtain by one means what God had intended to be obtained by another...// leads to pain and disappointment and nonfulfillment.
• We live in a century in which everything has been said. the challenge today is to learn which statements to deny. (quoting from Charles Hartshorne)
• There are many traps in the world of religion. spirituality for the sake of the spirit is not a sufficient reason for being spiritual. 
• Religion and its specifics can easily lose contact with what salivation is all about. It is not about ritual, it is about a relationship.
• Ask God for forgiveness for having gone after things that were not in His plan for you. To ask for His forgiveness for a misplaced search may be the first step in turning around in the right direction.
• We have to remember that By our own efforts  we cannot produce a truly spiritual life.
• Ceremony no more changes reality than outward behavior guarantees love.
• We've forgotten what true wonder is about. We've been sidetracked into seeking it in the wrong places. We need to turn in reality to the Shepherd of our souls and recover the wonder lost in our passionate pursuits and misdirected searches.
• Gratitude fills the heart when the gift has been understood, and wonder fills the soul when gratitude is expressed to the fullest. 
• Edward Arlington Robinson: There are 2 kinds of gratitude, the sudden kind we feel for what has been taken and the larger kind we feel for what we give.
• It is not whether things could be better or worse but that the heart celebrates the privilege of knowing the Giver who will withhold no good thing from them who love Him.
• The world is larger and more beautiful than my tiny struggle. There is a larger context.
• Truth is indispensable to finding the meaning of life.
• When there is loss of love, rejection and hate surface. Rejection Hurts.Hate destroys.
• Love pumps emotional intelligence through the blood vessels of life's daily encounters. It is the quiet confidence of belonging to someone other than oneself; a commitment to a cause greater than oneself; a relationship that makes choices apart from the self; it is the root and progenitor of unending sacrifice.
• The quest for God and spirituality. IT wasn't God who took centerstage but some man or idea that dominated the quest. (English poet John Donne)
• Forgiveness that makes it possible to delight in the loving mercy of God should never lose its novelty if wonder is to impel life forward so that we are not trapped in the past. Psalm 32:1
• Only God is able to humble us without humiliating us and to exalt us without flattering us.
• Romance is much deeper than sexuality and protective love cannot keep us from some losses over time.
• Time and again Peter overestimated his commitment, he missed the second step- to give himself fully to that love.
• It is easy in a vast world with a diversity of giftedness to forget that God has a personal concern in my life.
• William Cowper: Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan His works in vain; God is His own interpreter, and He will make it plain.
• By rising from the dead,  Christ confirms within our hears that while surrounded by death and the limitations of time, there is a reality that stretches beyond the now to the very presence of God.
• The weight of glory- CS Lewis: Heaven- we cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it.
• Know what it means to live by essence and not function, know what it means to be apart from what it means to do, nudges open the door of understanding.
• Our strengths and weaknesses are impeded by the sheer weight of material existence and sensuality.
• We need purity in order to have an encounter with God.
• Some things in life are harder to maintain than attain.
• Jim Elliot: He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
• Know what we can afford to lose and know what we must uncompromisingly hold on to.
• To gain what is merely temporal and lose what is desirably eternal.
• Whatever is, is. Parmenides
• Whatever it is , is changing. Heraclitus
• Discover the strength of change in the hands of an unchanging God.
• Finding permanence in the progressive stages.
• Gain the right things and lose what must be lost.
• Time does bequeath wisdom, and a small window of opportunity remains.
• CS Lewis, the Screwtape Letters. "to exult in the monotonous".
• Some things can be lost. and the older we get the more we need somebody bigger than we are to restore what we have lost.
• Aslan... every year you grow, you will find me bigger.
• It is not that there are no more disappointments but that we look at them differently. IT is not that there are no more temptations but that we respond to them differently.  it is not that nothing is ever lost but that we don't hold on to things in the same way. the more we mature in our thinking, the bigger God looks to us, because it is we who need to grow, not He. FW Boreham, The Telescope
• We need to learn to treasure the Word and look through it to the Source of all life. God's Word is the bank that provides the capital from which we draw when life exacts a cost.
• His Word does not change because it is true for every stage of life, in every circumstance. 
• It keeps us real in our expectations, promising not a trouble-free trip but God's presence in very trial.
• The Christian Faith is not all about me, what I feel, and what I want.
• The mindlessness of some of the stuff we ingest in our reading. poison we take in by our reading that leads us to false expectations in the christian life....
• Thinking is a dying discipline in a society that throbs with activity.
• Renew one's sense of thinking and keep the heart sensitive to the newness of God's touch by being in regular times of solitude and quietness before God. We do not even think of the choices (decisions) we make and the deeds we practice.
• Scriptures do not tell us to empty our minds and think of nothing but to exercise the minds God has given us to think on. Philippians 4:8
• I delight in the company of those who enrich my thinking. 
• Plan your time with those who think well, who think deeply, and who think about things that really matter.
• Be in a place where thinking is restored.
• The church is to be a place simple in its appearance but profound in its talk.
• In the closet of our lives lies the fullness of his riches.
• Prayer is at once the place of victory yet the place into which we are so reticent to step.
• There, God brings our wills into alignment with His. He brings our will into line to gladly receive His will.
• Worship is a PERSONAL thing before it goes public. it is an INDIVIDUAL thing before it is part of a community. It is a DISCIPLINED thing before it is natural.