Offering on the altar

"So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.

Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.

Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.
Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it.

Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."

Romans 12:1-2 (The Message)

I love love LOVE The Message's translation.
It makes complicated things so simple and easy to understand.

Philip Yancey writes about the Benedictines.
Boy, that's a group of people I wanna get to know.

"We humans struggle to find a balance between expressing our desires without inhibition and squelching them altogether...I came back to Christianity because it made the most sense of the world around me, in part by achieving the necessary balance. It exalts every person as a creature made in the image of God and yet warns that the image has been marred, something I found true of everyone I met. It honors sex, money, and power as good things, God's own gifts, while also recognizing them as powerful force that msut be handled with care, like radioactive material. In short, it applies a dose of realism to the chaos of human longings."
Philip Yancey, Rumours of Another World

Expressing our desires without inhibition; squelching them altogether.
A does of realism to the choas of human longings.
Love the way he phrases it.