"I have a confession to make: I'm addicted to the gospel. It burns inside of me. And it seems to get hotter every day. I can't stop thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it, reading about it, wrestling with it, reveling in it, standing on it, and thanking God for it. For better or for worse, my focus has become myopic. My passion has become singular... I'm beginning to realize that the gospel is way more radical, offensive, liberating, shocking, and counterintuitive than any of us realize... Like Aslan in C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, the gospel is good but not safe." Tullian Tchividjian, Jesus + Nothing = Everything

more quotes from The Spring Wind

(p.89) "What we saw as an opportunity, Wing Sung saw as exploitation... exploitation of his friendship. What we wanted to give, he was afraid was going to get him. How could we be true to our Christian motivation of sharing the love of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and yet show this boy that we respected him first of all as a person... as the person he was at that moment, and not the person he might become if he someday conformed to our thinking?...

'My brothers and the people in the village will never believe it, not until they see it.'"

(p. 99) "It was only a simple meal of rice and meat, with greens form Yau Tai's stall, but it will always stand out in our minds as a most significant occasion. We gathered around the table, held hands as a family and friends, and Gordon thanked God for the food in Chinese... Just as we were ready to raise our heads, Ah Chun began to speak. I looked at him, and realized his eyes were closed and his head was bowed. I closed my eyes and listened. He was speaking to God in a prayer that made my heart stand still. He prayed in Jesus' name, a prayer direct and simple. I was silent for a moment.

'Ah Chun!' Gordon said, extending his hand. 'I didn't know you were a Christian!'

'Ding Mok-si! I didn't either! I wasn't, but I am! This is the first time I've ever prayed aloud to God... the first time! You were all praying, and I felt my heart move and tell me to pray. I've prayed to God aloud for the fist time!'

I sat with head down, not daring to look up. To hear a man establishing a speaking relationship with God was an awesome thing... an awesome thing to happen over rice and tea and half-washed hands, clasped in a squirming circle of peeping children and tired adults at the end of a day..."

(p.104) "Language is a people-oriented art, and only those who have a genuine interest in people for people's sake seem to mater it..."

(p.105) "O God! make us free... free like the grass to bend with the wind, with no consciousness of our rightness or wrongness, but only of your greatness."

(pp.111-112) "'Few people are blackhearted,' Gordon said. 'There are times when we understand and times when we do not understand. Misunderstanding acts like blackheartedness.'... But dare we tell him now that the builders of the first bridges he had known were also the stokers of his early fires of mistrust?... That good and evil were not two men, but in every man... in us?

I glanced again at his puzzled face, and knew. Yes, we dared. We dared because we were not playing roles. We were not the wise seeking to teach the foolish, the good seeking to eradicate the bad. We were persons, capable of understanding and misunderstanding, of understanding a thousand things and failing to understand a thousand more, and as persons we could dare to share ourselves not only as we were but as we had been.

The fences were down, and the lines were gone between us. We were no longer foreigner and Chinese seeking to adapt and bow to each other, dealing in bargains and tinged with mistrust. We were a company of people walking along the road, surrounded by darkness but walking toward light... people with faces turned toward the wind... The Spring Wind, before which we must all bow as grass.

The night wind blew up from the sea, and we turned our faces toward home."

"...we've cried and we've tried and we've sweat and we've bled. but we don't just need atonement, we need to be raised from the dead... you gotta let his blood stain you if you want to be free..." -- if you want to be free, waterdeep

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that" --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

"God is not passive, for love is never passive, but always passionate; and passion always leads to action" - Erwin McManus

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”

"Men are like buses. If you miss one, another is on the way." Sarah quoting Zeke in "Parenthood"

Tonight in our film night we watched and discussed Blood Diamond. As we discussed it, we quickly began to talk about the human condition and the world in which we live and WHAT would change that reality. A friend of mine who helps child soldiers in East Asia posted this video on youtube to the tune of John Lennon's Happy Xmas. No matter what your political views, there are grave atrocities going on around the world and most the time we are completely unaware of anything more than what happens right outside the window of our home. As he said when he posted it, "Suspend cynicism and let this video wreck you." Here it is.

If you want to see the work they are doing, go here. And if you want to watch a couple videos to get you thinking more, here you go:

Project: AK-47 exists to rescue child soldiers. from PROJECT: AK-47 on Vimeo.

"WEAR THEIR REALITY." Project: AK-47's dog tags for child soldier advocacy from PROJECT: AK-47 on Vimeo.

And here is another one with another organization on slave labor:


And now some quotes, good quotes:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

-Theodore Roosevelt


"We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true."

-Dallas Willard


"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

-Nelson Mandela


"People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway. If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway. What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway. Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway. In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."

-Mother Teresa

“Thou shalt never be a perpetrator. Thou shalt never be a victim. And thou shalt never, but never, be a bystander.”

-Yehuda Bauer

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world die." - Mahatma Gandhi

Bono: "You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It's clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I'm absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that "as you reap, so you will sow" stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff...

...I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep s---. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.

Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: he was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn't allow you that. Christ says: No. I'm not saying I'm a teacher, don't call me teacher. I'm not saying I'm a prophet. I'm saying: "I'm the Messiah." I'm saying: "I am God incarnate... I know you're expecting me to come back with an army, and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. So what you're left with is: either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase... The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me, that's far-fetched …

...I love the idea of the Sacrificial Lamb. I love the idea that God says: Look, you cretins, there are certain results to the way we are, to selfishness, and there's a mortality as part of your very sinful nature, and, let's face it, you're not living a very good life, are you? There are consequences to actions. The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That's the point. It should keep us humbled... It's not our own good works that get us through the gates of heaven.

If only we could be a bit more like Him, the world would be transformed. …When I look at the Cross of Christ, what I see up there is all my s--- and everybody else's. So I ask myself a question a lot of people have asked: Who is this man? And was He who He said He was, or was He just a religious nut? And there it is, and that's the question. And no one can talk you into it or out of it."



Grace... Redemption... God taking my sin and my place on the cross... God paying my debt and giving me LIFE, not just putting me at zero or neutral but giving me his character and goodness accredited to my account (and then teaching me to walk in his ways and giving me the ability to do so)... all things I'm oh so very thankful for and yet wish that somehow I understood them better than I do, internally, so that I would actually live FULLY out of those realities and truths, particularly as they relate to loving others well and helping others to understand and fully grasp the unmerited grace and love of God in Christ. :-o

"...church...a place of welcome and laughter, of healing and hope, of friends and family and justice and new life. It's where the homeless drop in for a bowl of soup and the elderly stop by for a chat. It's where one group is working to help the drug addicts and another is campaigning for global justice. It's where you'll find people learning to pray, coming to faith, struggling with temptation, finding new purpose, and getting in touch with a new power to carry that purpose out. It's where people bring their own small faith and discover, in getting together with others to worship the one true God, that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. No church is like this all the time. But a remarkable number of churches are partly like that for quite a lot of the time.

Nor must we forget that it was the church in South Africa which worked and prayed and suffered and struggled so that, when major change happened and apartheid was overthrown and a new freedom came to that land, it came without the massive bloodshed we were all expecting. It was the church which stayed alive at the heart of the old Communist eastern Europe, and which at the end, with processions of candles and crosses, made it clear that enough was enough. It is the church which, despite all its follies and failings, is there when it counts in hospitals, schools, prisons, and many other places..." NT Wright, Simply Christian, p. 123

"Right from the beginning we run into the problem that will haunt the narrative throughout: What happens when the lifeboat which sets off to rescue the wrecked ship is itself trapped between the rocks and the waves, itself in need of rescue? What happens when the people through whom God wants to mount his rescue operation, the people through whom he intends to set the world to rights, themselves need rescuing, themselves need putting to rights? What happens when Israel becomes part of the problem, not just the bearer of the solution?...

... the story of Israel [as told throughout the Bible] carries at its heart a single theme... It is the story of going away and coming back home again" of slavery and exodus, of exile and restoration. It is the story which Jesus of Nazareth consciously told in his words, in his actions, and supremely in his death and resurrection." NT Wright, p.75,Simply Christian

I loved this movie. It's been a few years since I saw it, but it left an impression and BEAUTY is a major theme in it. I thought back to the movie briefly as I read the following quote from Simply Christian (again, you should really read the whole book):

"Beauty, in other words, is another echo of a voice - a voice which (from the evidence before us) might be saying one of several different things, but which, were we to hear it in all its fullness, would make sense of what we presently see and hear and know and love and call "beautiful." ...

Heaven and earth are full of a glory, a glory which stubbornly refuses to be reduced to terms of the senses of the humans who perceive it." - NT Wright, Simply Christian, Chapter 4

"I had a dream the other night, a powerful and interesting dream. And the really frustrating thing about it is that I can't remember what it was about. I had a flash of it as I woke up, enough to make me think how extraordinary and meaningful it was; and then it was gone. And so, to misquote TS Eliot, I had the meaning but missed the experience.

Our passion for justice often seems like that. We dream the dream of justice. We glimpse, for a moment, a world at one, a world put to rights, a world where things work out, where societies function fairly and efficiently, where we not only know what we ought to do but actually do it. And then we wake up and come back to reality. But what are we hearing when we're dreaming that dream?

It's as though we can hear, not perhaps a voice itself, but the echo of a voice: a voice speaking with calm, healing authority, speaking about justice, about things being put to rights, about peace and hope an prosperity for all. The voice continues to echo in our imagination, our subconscious. We want to go back and listen to it again, but having woken up we can't get back into the dream. Other people sometimes tell us it was just a fantasy, and we're half-inclined to believe them, even though that condemns us to cynicism.

But the voice goes on, calling us, beckoning us, luring us to think that there might be such a things as justice, as the world being put to rights, even though we find it so elusive. We're like moths trying to fly to the moon. We all know there's something called justice, but we can't quite get to it." NT Wright, Simply Christian, Chapter 1 "Putting the World to Rights"

By the way, great, great book!!!

"There are two sorts of traveler. The first sets off in the general direction of the destination and is quite happy to figure things out on the way, to read the signposts, ask directions, and muddle through. The second wants to know in advance what the road will be like, where it changes from a country road to a busy multilane highway, how long it will take to complete the different sections and so on.

Concertgoers are often like that, too. Some listeners prefer to allow the music to make its own impact, carrying them along from movement to movement without their knowing where it will go next. Others find great enjoyment by reading a program note in advance so that they can anticipate whtat is to come and have a mental picture of hte whole while listening to the parts as they unfold..." NT Wright, Simply Christian, Introduction

I just read this on a friend of a friend's blog and thought it was worth repeating. It's actually from Rob Bell's book Sex God, which is a great book, by the way.

"You don’t need a man by your side to validate you as a woman. You already are loved and valued. You’re good enough exactly as you are. Do you believe this? Because it’s true. You have limitless worth and value. If you embrace this truth, it will affect every area of your life, especially your relationship with men.

You are worth dying for.

Your worth does not come from your body, your mind, your work, what you produce, what you put out, how much money you make. Your worth does not come from whether or not you have a man. Your worth does not come from whether or not men notice you. You have inestimable worth that comes from your Creator.

You will continue to be tempted in a thousand different ways not to believe this. This temptation will be to go searching for your worth and validity from places other than your Creator.

Especially from men.

But you don’t have to give yourself away to earn a man’s love. You’re better than that. You’re already loved.

When you give too much of yourself away too quickly, when you show too much skin, you’re not being true to yourself. When you dress to show us everything, then in some sense we have all shared in it, or at least been exposed to it. There is a mystery to you, infinite depth and endless complexity.

As the woman says in Song of Songs, “My own vineyard is mine to give.” In the ancient Near East, a vineyard was a euphemism for sexuality. She is saying that she doesn’t give herself to just anyone. She is fully in control of herself, and she is not cheap, and she is not easy.

Your strength is a beautiful thing. And when you live in it, when you carry yourself with the honor and dignity that are yours, it forces the men around you to relate to you on more than just a flesh level.

You are worth dying for.

When you live in your true identity, when you find your worth and value in your Creator, when you live “in Christ,” in who you really are, you force men to rethink what it means to be a man." -Sex God by Rob Bell

the rest of God

“Sanctifying some time adds richness to all time, just as an hour with the one you love brings light and levity to the hours that follow. To spend time with the object of your desire is to emerge, not sullen and peevish, but elated and refreshed. you come away filled, not depleted.

The Greeks understood. Embedded in their language, expressed in two distinct words for ‘time,’ is an intuition about the possibility of sanctified time. Time, they knew, has two faces, two natures. It exists in two separate realms,...One is sacred time, the other profane.

The first word is chronos... It is the time of clock and calendar, time as a gauntlet, time as a forced march. The word derives from one of the gods in the Greek pantheon. Chronos was a nasty minor deity, a glutton and a cannibal who gorged himself on his own children. He was always consuming, never consummated. Goya depicted him in his work ‘Chronos Devouring His Children.’ In the painting, Chronos is gaunt and ravenous, wild-eyed with hunger. He crams a naked, bloody-stumped figure into his gaping mouth. peter Paul Rubens depicted Chronos even more alarmingly: a father viciously biting into his son’s chest and tearing the flesh away, the boy arching backward in shock and pain.

Chronos is the presiding deity of the driven.

The second Greek word is kairos. This is time as gift, as opportunity, as season. It is time pregnant with purpose. In kairos time you ask, not ‘What time is it?’ but ‘What is this time FOR?’ Kairos is the servant of holy purpose. ‘There is a time for everything,’ Ecclesiastes says, ‘and a season for every activity under heaven.’ 

‘A time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot, ...
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,...
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace, (3:1-2, 5-8)...” (p. 36-37)



“The Chinese join two characters to form a single pictograph for busyness: heart and killing. That is stunningly incisive. The heart of the place the busy life exacts its steepest toll...

One measure for whether or not you’re rested enough... is to ask yourself this: How much do I care about the things I care about? When we lose concern for people,...when we cease to laugh...or weep; when we hear news of trouble among our neighbors and our first thought is that we hope it isn’t going to involve us-- when we stop caring about the things we care about-- that’s a signal we’re too busy. We have let ourselves be consumed by the things that feed the ego but starve the soul.

Busyness kills the heart... Busyness makes us stop caring about the things we care about. And not only that. Busyness also robs us of knowing God the way we might... other facets of God we discover only through stillness. ‘Be still,’ the psalm instructs,’and know that I am God’ (Ps. 46:10)” (p.45, 48, 49)

Excerpts taken from "The Rest of God" by Mark Buchanan

"The key to the joyful Christian life is having a clear understanding of who God really is.

It's not about me. I cannot fix myself...Only God can. Even my ability to have faith and believe God for great things is nothing more than a mere symptom of my view of God... What we believe to be true about God's character affects every aspect of our lives. God, and God alone is the issue." Forward to Discover God Bible Study Nº1

"He does not derive His power from any other source; all power has always been His and will continue to be His for eternity. Any power that we have comes ultimately from God." Bill Bright, Discover God

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of GOd was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light." Genesis 1.1-3

a quiet sunday

I've been enjoying a few relaxing days after having had the stomach flu. And while I hate being sick, I love being forced to rest - completely. And since I had time (since I was supposed to be out of town) and didn't want to relapse, I did in fact rest well.

Since then I've been getting around to a few projects around the house, such as finally staining the dining room chairs to match the table - a dark walnut. The look very nice by the way. I've also gotten the desire to change a few things, to redecorate the living room and rearrange my room (which is going to be a challenge since everything presently fits perfectly like a jigsaw puzzle).

Some friend are out of town, so I'm feeding and taking care of their kitty. They have an amazing library, so I'm borrowing a few books. And since they return in a week, I need to get reading. One of the books I borrowed is a collection of C.S. Lewis writings, specifically The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Miracles, The Case for Christianity and Christian Behaviour. I just started the Screwtape Letters and was struck by a quote in the preface:

We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment. This, to begin with.

I'll probably add some more quotes here as I continue my way through these and several other books I have on loan from friends, or which I've been waiting way to long to read.

Another one from the preface, which by the way, is quite good:

Bad angels, like bad men, are entirely practical. They have two motives. THe first is fear of punishment... Their second motive is a kind of hunger. I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one's fellow; to make his whole intellectual an devotional life merely an extension of one's own -- to hate one's hatreds and resent one's grievances and indulge one's egoism through him as well as through oneself. HIs own little store of passion must of course be suppressed to make room for ours. If he resists this suppression he is being selfish.

Letter #3:

My dear Wormwood,
I am very pleased by what you tell me about this man's relations with his mother. But you must press your advantage. The Enemy will be working from the centre outwards, gradually bringing more and more of the patient's conduct under the new standard, and may reach his behaviour to the old lady at any moment. You want to get in first. Keep in close touch with our colleague Glubose who is in charge of the mother, and build up between you in that house a good settled habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks. The following methods are useful.
1. Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the states of his own mind-- or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see. Encourage this. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.
2. It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very "spiritual", that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother - the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time, you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling form his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment's notice from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's "soul" to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.
3. When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother's eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy - if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of that assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, that is easily managed
4. In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itslef by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but the tone of voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face. To keep this game up you and Glubose must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: "I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper." Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken....
Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape

In reading this letter, it is sad how close to reality this actually can be, in my life with roommates more often than i wish. Thank God that the Holy Spirit is present to bring truth to light and to bring about clarity of vision and conviction, so that while I am way too often blind, I do at some point see.

"O God Most High, Most Glorious,
The thought of thine infinite serenity cheers me,
For I am toiling and moiling, troubled and distressed,
but thou art for ever at perfect peace.
Thy designs cause thee no fear or care of unfulfilment,
they stand fast as the eternal hills.
Thy power knows no bond,
thy goodness no stint.
Thou bringest order out of confusion,
and my defeats are thy victories:
The Lord God omnipotent reigneth.
I come to thee as a sinner with cares and sorrows,
to leave every concern entirely to thee,
every sin calling for Christ's precious blood;
Revive deep spirituality in my heart;
Let me live near to the great Shepherd,
hear his voice, know its tones, follow its calls.
Keep me from deception by causing me to abide in the truth,
from harm by helpin gme to walk in the power of the Spirit.
Give me intenser faith in the eternal verities,
burning into me by experience the things I know;
Let me never be ashamed of the truth of the gospel,
that I may bear its reproach,
vindicate it,
see Jesus as its essence,
know in it the power of the Spirit.
Lord, help me, for I am often lukewarm and chill;
unbelief mars my confidence,
sin makes me forget thee.
Let the weeds that grow in my soul be cut at their roots;
Grant me to know that I truly live only when I live to thee,
that all else is trifling.
Thy presence alone can make me holy, devout, strong and happy.
Abide in me, gracious God." - Valley of Vision, "Resting On God"

"There have been times when I think we don not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.... It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work.... All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it." - C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

"How sweet all at once it was for me to be ride of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose...! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood, you who outshine all light, yet are hidden deeper than any secret in our hearts, you who surpass all honor, though not in the eyes of men who see all honor in themselves.... O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation." - Augustine

"Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people), like a crutch, which is a substitute for a leg. most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it's idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits, etc.) can do the journey on their own!" - C.S. Lewis