The Adventure of living

• For my part, I much prefer real-life problems to fictitious ones. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• The God of the Bible is the God who acts. This is what distinguishes him from the God of the philosophers and from the gods of all the other religions. He is the God who commits himself. He commits himself in every man’s life. He does not interest himself only in man’s religious life but in his whole life, in his work, in his occupation – as potter, as shepherd, as official, as housewife – and he turns the occupation into a veritable adventure. He is a God who works. The Bible uses a powerful image when it speaks of the “hands” of God (Isaiah 45:12). – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• To his contemporaries Jesus was a true adventurer. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• But what life is easy? None. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• The real problem is to make a success of one’s marriage if one does marry, and to make a success of the celibate life is one does not. Each vocation is as difficult as the other. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• To live one’s life with conviction is to live it in a spirit of adventure, as an adventure. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• The biblical revelation gives us no guiding principle for our conduct beyond a few very simple laws such as that of honesty or love, which unbelievers accept as readily as we do, which are common to the Christian revelation and to the natural law. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• There are people who go on indefinitely preparing for life instead of living it. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• It is as a result, then, of being made in the image of God that man throws himself so eagerly into all the adventures God opens up before him. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• Religious people would like to get the others interested in the religion they themselves are involved in. But it is for the religious people to begin by taking an interest in what concerns the others. That is love. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• How is it that the majority of believers lack the spirit of adventure? I think it is a result of the tendency of all of us, believers and unbelievers alike, to think of spiritual values as being opposed to material values. We oppose the spiritual life to “real life,” heaven to earth. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• Believers, because of the very fact that they have asked themselves what is “worthwhile,” because they have realized that God is the only possible source of all authentic value, have stopped taking any interest in anything that is not religion. They have turned their backs on the earth so as to look only at heaven. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• In the biblical perspective there are not two distinct worlds, the profane and the sacred. Everything is sacred. The hand of God is not to be seen in abstract ideas, but in nature, in history in all the adventures of all men. God is interested in everything. We in our turn when we come into contact with him experience a renewal of interest in everything, even in those things that are apparently most trivial. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.
• Yes, of course, adventure – but which? We must tackle the question now. – Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living.