Quotes from Rob Bell

You start with your 1 and then you suspend judgment on what you're doing, because you don't know what you have when you start. When you are constantly judging what you're doing, you aren't here. You aren't present. You are standing outside of your life, looking in, observing. The time for judgement will come at some point, but in the moment, you have only the 1. And then the 2. And then the 3...

Can your story be retold? Can all of the various things that have happened to you and the things you have done you'd prefer to never think about again and the embarrassing parts and the painful parts—can all of it be retold in such a way that the worst parts become the most powerful, poignant parts?

Gospel is the announcement of who God insists you are. You're a child of God, not because of how great you are but because God has all kinds of kids and you're one of them.

It is as if the smallest amount of light is infinitely more powerful than massive amounts of dark.

What's the Best Question to Ask When You're Reading the Bible? Why did people find this important to write down?...Why did people write this down? What was going on in their world that this was important to them? Why did they feel the need to put words to this? Start with that question. Start with those questions. And see what happens.

There are more atoms than molecules, but a molecule is more complex than an atom. There are more molecules than cells, but a cell is more complex than a molecule. And so on up the hierarchy it goes, with increasingly complex levels of organization at each higher level.

when I'm talking about God, I'm talking about a reality known, felt, and experienced, but one that cannot be located in any specific physical space in any tangible way.

Why didn't they just skip the whole sacrificial system all together? That would have been amazing. Just scrap the whole thing. Announce that the final sacrifice has been offered and there's no more need to do such things. Declare that the temple is going to be torn down. Proclaim that it is finished. Oh wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we? (Please tell me you enjoyed that last paragraph.)

You dance with the Bible, but you also interrogate it. You challenge it, question it, poke it, probe it. You let it get under your skin. We read it, and we let it read us, and then we turn the gem, again, and again, and again, seeing something new over and over and over again . . .

Sometimes we've accepted rules and codes and limits without realizing it.

Some things that religious people make a big deal of are rather pointless. Avoid the insanity.

When so much gets left behind, you discover that you're fine. You've got a little fear, like a fly buzzing around your head, but you're fine. You're also free. What a gift.

Strange, how the writer doesn't explain why Abraham leaves other than saying he hears a divine voice. Something intimate and infinite is calling to him, and he listens.

the one about Abraham leaving, is revolutionary. It's a step forward in human consciousness. You can step out of the cycle? You can leave? And head into the unknown? You can step into something that hasn't happened yet, that doesn't exist yet?

He heard something? That's the best the writer can do? That's so vague. Ambiguous. Fuzzy. Exactly. Sometimes the most powerful truths in a story are the ones that are never explicitly stated.

Your body is made up of around seventy-five trillion cells, every one of those cells containing hundreds of thousands of molecules with six feet of DNA in every cell containing over three billion letters of coding. These cells are a potent blend of matter and memory—bones and hair and blood and teeth and at the same time personality and essence and predispositions and habits.

Even the slightest tremors of bitterness can block the flow of love.

What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split. I was split. I had this person I knew I was made to be, yet it was mixed in with all of these other ... people. As the lights were turned on, I saw I had all of this guilt and shame because I wasn't measuring up to the image of the perfect person I had in my head.

We're made of dust and we come from the stars, we're both skin and soul, blood and being— at 98.6 degrees continually radiating about 100 watts of energy into our surroundings, containing 7 × 1018 joules of potential energy, the equivalent of 30 large hydrogen bombs.

A church is an organization that exists for the benefit of nonmembers.

You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. —Alan Watts

And if you keep telling people who they are, who their best selves are, if you keep reminding them of their true identity, there's a good chance they'll figure out what to

because everything is connected to everything else, and the more we know about who and where we come from, the more we know about where we're headed.

When you are both intentional about moving toward the other in love, over time you build up tremendous reserves of love and grace and goodwill. Love - with spark and substance and sacrifice all together - is a cumulative phenomenon. It builds on itself, it gains a head of steam, it grows in depth and breadth and intensity. This propels you into an entirely different way of relating to each other - another kind of life altogether.