“I choose to believe God is calling us to intimacy these days, to be intimate and provocative. In a way, we are reaching for the soil of each other’s souls. And when we reach for that soil, how are we tilling the field of the soul in order to awaken the seeds of […] a better world than the one we’re living in? But [we must] also be able to hold the pain and the sorrow and the sadness and the grief that we’re not there yet. We’re not there yet.”
“Hope has nothing to do with what you think is going to happen, and everything to do with where you point your life, sometimes in spite of the odds, rather than because of them.”
“Quaker anger, that’s discomforting for a lot of people. We are a religion that believes in continuing revelation… that the messages are there if you simply listen. And sometimes, when you listen to the messages, they’re telling you very uncomfortable things. They’re telling you to get off your ass and do something. They’re telling you to not just sit there and pontificate or feel stricken…. I feel stricken a lot, but I don’t want to sit. I want to do something, and that doing something usually means writing or speaking to people. And if you simply sit back in your pew and feel stricken, it’s not good enough. It really isn’t.”
“Prophetic witness means… that there’s another possibility that is equally real and perhaps more real, and we’re choosing to live in allegiance to that. That becomes an opposition to all that is contrary to human flourishing and to justice and to wholeness and to healing.
So my hope and my prayer is that each of us will be faithful to what we’re given, and to trust that there is a greater love at work, even in these dark times, and especially, in fact, in these times.”
April 20-26, 2026: This week’s messages are guest edited by Zack Jackson, a podcaster, pastor, and professor. He lifts up stories of spiritual courage as the producer and co-host of Thee Quaker Podcast. Along with his wife Nichole, he is the co-founder of Open Table United Church of Christ in Pottstown, PA.
“Love was the first motion, and thence a concern arose to spend some time with the Indians, that I might feel and understand their life and the Spirit they live in, if haply I might receive some instruction from them, or they be in any degree helped forward by my following the leadings of Truth amongst them.”
“Our witness tells us that we need not wait for nuclear warfare to strike us before we strip our lives of… superfluities; we need not wait for events to bend our wills to unison…. We must simplify our daily routine without waiting for legislation; we must take our political and public responsibilities without having to take the negative action of being ‘against’ nuclear testing, the death-use of science, the military-moulding of education.”
“Quakers view truth as something that happens, it occurs…. Truth is not a dead fact which is known: It is a living occurrence in which we participate, the guiding concern of people bearing witness is to live rightly, in ways that are exemplary…. Quakers are convinced that genuine leadings all proceed from a common ground, spring from a unity which we seek and find.”
“We have often wondered whether there is anything Quakers today can say as one. After much struggle we have discovered that we can proclaim this: there is a living God at the centre of all, who is available to each of us as a Present Teacher at the very heart of our lives. We seek as people of God to be worthy vessels to deliver the Lord’s transforming word, to be prophets of joy who know from experience and can testify to the world, as George Fox did, ‘that the Lord God is at work in this thick night.'”
“I heard that New England had made a law to put the servants of the living God to death if they returned after they were sentenced away, which did come near me at that time; and, as I considered the thing and pondered it in my heart, immediately came the word of the Lord unto me, saying, ‘Thou knowest not but that thou mayst go thither.’”
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