Crazy is...

This...made me laugh. Out loud. Let's just say that with less than three weeks before our family will be waking up in Africa, I resonate.

“I am on the board of a seminary where they have a psychiatric wing, and they wanted to send psychologists around the world to work with missionaries.  They were coming in telling us how they were going to spend millions of dollars to bring mental health to all of our missionaries. And I couldn’t hold in; I said, ‘No! Don’t do it! We don’t need healthy missionaries. We need missionaries who are delusional, who are out of their minds, who are insane.  There are two of them among ten million and they think they can change that whole city. You make them normal, healthy, sane and they’re going home to Kansas tomorrow.’” --Erwin McManus (swiped from my sister Kelli and her husband Stephen's blog)

Quote: Spurgeon on pride

This quote seems to startle me every time I read it...and show me that I still have a long way to go.

O believer, learn to reject pride, seeing that you have no ground for it. Whatever you are, you have nothing to make you proud. The more you have, the more you are in debt to God; and you should not be proud of that which renders you a debtor. Consider your origin; look back to what you were. Consider what you will have been but for divine grace. Look upon yourself as you are now. Doesn’t your conscience reproach you? Don’t your thousand wanderings stand before you, and tell you that you are unworthy to be called His son or daughter? And if He has made you anything, aren’t you taught thereby that it is grace which has made you to differ? Great believer, you would have been a great sinner if God had not made you to differ. O you who are valiant for truth, you would have been as valiant for error if grace had not laid hold upon you. Therefore, don’t be proud, though you have a large estate - a wide domain of grace, once you did not have a single thing to call your own except your sin and misery. Oh!
Strange infatuation that you, who have borrowed everything, should think of exalting yourself... (Charles Spurgeon)

If you're looking for a practical and truly wonderful message on this topic, check out this one by Francis Chan, which made it worth my youngest getting up at six one morning so I could listen to it...