Quotes from Rob Bell

We are always in the endless process of figuring out our ikigai. Your ikigai is a web of work and family and play and how you spend your time, what you give your energies to, what you say "yes" to, what you say "no" to, what new challenges you take on, things that come your way that you never wanted or planned for or know what to do with— your ikigai is a work in progress because you are a work in progress.

Life is too short to help make a world you don't want to live in.)

So when people say they don't believe in hell and they don't like the word "sin," my first response is to ask, "Have you sat and talked with a family who just found out their child has been molested?

Neither son understands that the father's love was never about any of that. The father's love cannot be earned, and it cannot be taken away. It just is.

When you pursue your path, exploring the possibilities as you search for your ikigai, pay careful attention to things that make you angry and get you all riled up and provoke you to say, Someone should do something about that!!! The someone may be you.

Some things you do for you. You do them because it gives you great satisfaction and it puts a smile on your face and that's it. And that's fine. It's not just fine, it's necessary. It makes you a better person, it fills your soul, it opens you up to life in its fullness. So don't apologize for it, enjoy it.

Soul doesn't care what it is or what it should be called. Soul just wants to enter into it. And feel it. And absorb it. And experience it. Soul wants to participate.

No, it's not. It's bigger and more expansive and inclusive and embracing and enlightened than that because the Jesus story is bigger and more expansive and inclusive and challenging and dangerous and enlightened than that.

Exactly. It's about a particular kind of relationship with a particular kind of God, one who is good and kind and generous. One who can be trusted. One who keeps insisting, Trust me, I got this.

I believe the discussion itself is divine.

When Jesus tells the man that there are rewards for him, he's promising the man that receiving the peace of God now, finding gratitude for what he does have, and sharing it with those who need it will create in him all the more capacity for joy in the world to come.

Yes. Abraham is being invited to trust God, to believe that God is good and has his best interests in mind and will be faithful to him even if Abraham makes a mess of things.