Let temporal things serve your use, but the eternal be the object of your desire.
—Thomas A. Kempis
Category Archives: Quotes to Ponder
not defined by the competition
IF
I cannot in honest happiness take the second place (or the twentieth);
If I cannot take the first without making a fuss about my unworthiness,
then I know nothing of Calvary Love.
-Amy Carmichael, If
simple prayer
“One simple way to move from the mind to heart is by slowly saying a prayer with as much attentiveness as possible. This may sound like offering a crutch to someone who asks you to heal his broken leg.
The truth, however, is that a prayer, prayed from the heart, heals.
When you know the Our Father, the Apotsles’ Creed, the “Glory Be to the Father” by heart, you have something to start with. You might like to learn by heart the Twenty-third Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd…” or Paul’s words about love to the Corinthians or St Francis’ prayer: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…”
As you lie in your bed, drive your car, wait for the bus, or walk your dog, you can slowly let the words of one of these prayers go through your mind simply trying to listen with your whole being to what they are saying. You will be constantly distracted by your worries, but if you keep going back o the words of the prayer, you will gradually discover that your worries become less obsessive and that you really start to enjoy praying. And as the prayer descends from your mind into the centre of your being you will discover it healing power.”
-Henri Nouwen, Here and Now
secret
“The secret to joy — is to keep seeking God where you doubt He is.”
-Ann Voskamp
he does love us, doesn’t he?
“Standing in the dark, looking out to the light, the hallway light, I don’t know how God answers all the begging prayers.
The begging prayers of mothers who’d like to wring death’s thin neck and make that child well.
I don’t know how God hears the wail of the woman howling raw for that one man to come love her right. The ache of the daughter rejected by the icy parent. The choking breath of the man crushed hard by a weight of debt.
There is this thrumming everywhere – the tears falling, a hard rain into His bottle and He has to hear. Shalom holds me tight, our hearts beating harder against each other in the dark.
She whispers it, “God does loves us, doesn’t He, Mama?”
And I nod and this is always the question and maybe this is all our faith really is — Faith is this unwavering trust in the heart of God in the hurt of here. Unwavering trust all the time though I don’t understand all the time.
God is always good and we are always loved.
Loved enough to be shaped into goodness of Christ Himself.”
longing to live life in his company
“Trust this, live in Jesus’ company, and you become a citizen of a new world, the world in which God’s rule has arrived. You will still be living in the everyday world in which many other powers claim to be ruling; but you will have become free of them, free to co-operate or not, depending on how far they allow you to be ruled by God. And what you do and say will become a sign of what is coming. Your life will give a foretaste of God’s rule; and it will be directed to inviting as many as possible to come under the same rule, and to resisting the powers (natural and supernatural) that work against God and seek to keep people in slavery.”
-Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust
so easily wrapped up
“I have a strong feeling that my intellectual formation is just as much a hindrance as a help to prayer. It is hard not to desire good insights during prayer and not to fall into a long inner discussion with myself.
Every time some kind of insight comes to me, I find myself wondering how I can use it isn a lecture, a sermon, or an article, and very soon I am far away from God and all wrapped up in my own preoccupations.
Maybe this what makes the Jesus prayer so good for me. Simply saying, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” a hundred times, a thousand, ten thousand times, as the Russian peasant did, might slowly clean my mind and give God a little chance.”
-Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary
born in God’s thought
“I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of;
for to have been thought about,
born in God’s thought,
and then made by God,
is the dearest, grandest and
most precious thing in all thinking.”
-George MacDonald
whew…
I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.
-Dorothy Day
threat or mysterious beauty?
“Each time an unexpected discovery is made in the world of knowledge,it shakes the religious establishment of the day. Now, we are often taught that it is unfaithful to question, traditional religious beliefs, but I believe we must question them, continually-Not God, not Christ, who are the center of our lives as believers-but what human beings say about God and about Christ; otherwise, like those of the church establishent of Galileo’s day, we truly become God’s frozen people. Galileo’s discoveries did nothing whatsoever to change the nature of God; they threatened only man’s rigid ideas of the nature of God. We must be constantly open to new revelation, which is another way of hearing God, with loving obedience.”
-Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections of Faith and Art
peacocks for pilgrims 