Quotes from Timothy Lane

Confronting a teenager five minutes before she leaves for school is not helpful, even if the content is accurate. Rebuking a friend for an offense in front of others is not helpful. Asking your husband to consider how you hurt him as he is trying to get to sleep is not helpful.

An ambassador seeks to speak the right thing in the best way.

we all must remember that our relationships have been designed as workrooms for redemption, not shelters for human happiness.

Remember, Father, Son, and Spirit were torn apart when Jesus died so that we might embrace rather than exclude one another. We have to be willing to face conflict. God wants us to grow and this is a crucial place where growth often occurs. He wants to make us more like Christ

While it may sound spiritual, the common practice of telling people to forget their lives over the past six days so that they can truly worship God for the next hour smacks more of Greek dualism than a biblical view of a spiritual person. Our lives over the past six days are what God is most interested in! A recognition of the Heat we all face will lead us to bring our messy lives before him.

The gospel gap in many of our lives doesn't stay empty either. If we do not live with a gospel-shaped, Christ-confident, and change-committed Christianity, that hole will get filled with other things. These things may seem plausible and even biblical, but they will be missing the identity-provision-process core that is meant to fill every believer.

the reality our imagination embraces is the reality we will live by. If we are not captured by the truth of living in a deeply personal relationship with God, we will shrink our expectations and dreams down to the size of our own selfish wants, desires, and strategies.

Relationships are costly, but so is avoiding them. If

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

Imagination is not the ability to dream up things that aren't real; it is the ability to see what is real but often unseen. As Eugene Peterson says in Subversive Spirituality, for a Christian whose hope is in an invisible God, seeing the unseen is essential. 24 Hebrews 11 calls this faith.

If you choose to face conflict head on, it is full of risks and the potential for great hurt, but it can also be redemptive.

Imagination opens things up so that we can grow into maturity—worship and adore, exclaim and honor, follow and trust. Explanation restricts and defines and holds down; imagination expands and lets loose. Explanation keeps our feet on the ground; imagination lifts our heads into the clouds. Explanation puts us in harness; imagination catapults us into mystery. Explanation reduces life to what can be used; imagination enlarges life into what can be adored.