Statements I Support:

The unnoticed, every-day habits of obedience are what make possible the large decisions of obedience. You may not aspire to be obedient with your life on a grand scale if you are not obedient daily on a small scale.

Obedience is a way of life that makes one much more likely to succeed and far less concerned with success.

The way of obedience is fundamentally a creative way. The word itself suggests stifling submission and a preoccupation with rules, but the truth is just the opposite: to live obedient is to find each day an adventure, each season of life a ? adorned with !’s.

One finds their true volition within the way of obedience. In offering your volition to a superior volition, you find an entirely new volition, purer and stronger, true and instinctive, part yours, part God’s, an infallible compass that requires only periodic maintenance of cleansing tears.

To dream is stifling. To be obedient is to truly dream.

To be obedient is to laugh, like Abraham and Sarah laughed, at the wonderful absurdity of promises and fulfillments well beyond your capacity to affect.

To be obedient is to acknowledge a boundary to your own understanding, which rather than being a compromise is rather a great liberation. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the borders of obedience are the most freeing experience I have ever had, for the borders of obedience are the borders of the Promised Land of the Soul. And so as not to be ignorantly disaffected, one will remember that the biblical Promised Land has both deserts and gardens. Obedience is a crown, sometimes composed of thorns.

Obedience is less frequently an action and more frequently a posture of rigorous self-inspection. The daily and silent rigor of the posture of obedience is what gives one strength and surety on the day when obedience at last commands movement.

The way of obedience draws on the best aspects of the passive and active attitudes. Ultimately passive and responsive before the universal Impulse, we find ourselves in concert with the ultimate Music, as one who dances with a great dancer takes pleasure in being led, free of the worries of initiation. At the same time, the obedient woman and obedient man is an activist, because the one obeyed is an activist too. Jonah was disobedient and ran from the people. Jesus was obedient and ran towards the people. We are obedient not for isolation but for engagement, and any vows of abstention taken in the name of obedience are on a deeper and more real level vows that free us to action.

Obedience is a patient pleasure. In the same way that the pleasure of good literature is not found in a good quote here and a good quote there, but rather in the subtle beauty linking page to page and passage to passage, so the pleasure of obedience is not to be found in a heroic deed here or an enlightened moment there, but is to be found rather in a span of days strung out on the single thread of saying yes to God’s yes and also yes to God’s no.

One’s ability to obey is not dependent on their level of education, how sound is their exegesis, or who their father is. One’s ability to obey is dependent on one’s ability to pray.