” Patience is more than endurance. A saint’s life is in the hands of God like a bow and arrow in the hands of an archer. God is aiming at something the saint cannot see, and He stretches and strains, and every now and again the saint says- “I cannot stand any more.” God does not heed, He goes on stretching till His purpose is in sight, then He lets fly. Trust yourself in God’s hands.” Oswald Chambers My Utmost For His Highest
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom – Anais Nin
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Who can so softly bind up the wounds of another as he who felt the same wound himself? — Thomas Jefferson
“I would have never known the meaning of various psalms, come to appreciate certain difficulties, or known the inner workings of the soul; I would never have understood the practice of the Christian life and work, if God had never brought afflictions to my life.”–Martin Luther’s wife, Katherine
“Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.”
Mother Teresa
“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
— John Donne, from Meditation XVII
“…But it seemed to me that this is the way we all lived: full to the brim with gratitude and joy one day, wrecked on the rocks the next. Finding the balance between the two was the art and salvation.”
– Betta Nolan, The Year of Pleasures
And ever since then, O Kings and Queens, I have been wandering to find him and my happiness is so great that it weakens me, even as a wound. And this is the wonder of wonders, that he called me Beloved, me, who am but as a dog.”
CS Lewis, The Last Battle
“I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness I can show to any fellow human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.” ~Stephen Grellet
You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him. ~Leo Aikman
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? ~Abraham Lincoln
There are two kinds of people, those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.” ~C. S. Lewis
“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us, we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.” CS Lewis
Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
– Catherine Drinker Bowen, 1897 – 1973
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. — Rainer Maria Rilke
Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if he or she were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness, and understanding you can muster, and do so with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
– Og Mandino
“Sometimes we pray for silver, when God wants to give us gold.”
We worship whom we trust, and we trust whom we know.” ~ David Jeremiah
“If I could just somehow,
passing through life,
be like salt in the Bible
and just make people thirsty
for the Word of life.
That’s all I’d ask.”
~Ruth Bell Graham
Tomorrow’s plans I do not know,
I only know THIS MINUTE,
But HE will say, “This is the way,
by faith now walk ye in it.”
“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 does NOT serve the world. There is no-thing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the Glory of God that is within us, ALL of us. And as we let our Light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fears, our Presence automatically liberates others.” Marianne Williamson
Grief is madness — ask anyone who’s been there. They will tell you it abates with time, but that’s a lie. What drowns you in the first year is a force of solitude and helplessness exactly equal in intensity to the love you had for the one who’s gone. Equally passionate, equally intimate. The spaces between the stabs of pain grow longer after a while, but they’re empty spaces. — Paul Monette, Borrowed Time
“I want to sit at Your feet, drink from the cup in Your hand, lay back against You and breathe, feel Your heart beat. This love is so deep; it’s more than I can stand. I melt in Your peace. It’s overwhelming.” –Kari Jobe, “The More I Seek You”
“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”
— Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
“Better to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than to fade and whither dismally with age.”
— Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, James Joyce
“When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at the trees. When there is nothing left to look at on this street. Four who grew despite concrete. Four whose only reason is to be and be.”
— The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
“That’s all I’ve ever dreamed of, Mr. Bones. To make the world a better place. To bring some beauty to the drab, humdrum corners of the soul. You can do it with a toaster, you can do it with a poem, you can do it by reaching out your hand to a stranger. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. To leave the word a little better than you found it. That’s the best a man could ever do.”
— Timbuktu, Paul Auster
“Faith isn’t the ability to believe long and far into the misty future. It’s simply taking God at his word and taking the next step.”
~Joni Eareckson Tada
“Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood
Others may deceive you, you decide what’s good
You decide alone, but no one is alone
Believe me, no one is alone”~Into the Woods (musical)
“When you have come to the edge
Of all light that you know
And are about to drop off into the darkness
Of the unknown,
Faith is knowing One of two things will happen:
There will be something solid to stand on or
You will be taught to fly”
Patrick Overton
“Be kinder than necessary. Everyone is fighting some sort of battle.”
Corrie Ten Boom said “There is no pit so deep that the love is Jesus is not deeper still”
“She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She only had to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.
It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.” My Antionia, by Willa Cather
Every person’s life is a fairy tale written by God’s fingers. – Hans Christian Andersen
Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark. — Rabindnanath Tagore
Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang the best. – Henry Van Dyke
“Refuse to fall down. If you cannot refuse to fall down, refuse to stay down, lift your heart toward heaven like a hungry beggar, ask that it be filled and it will be filled. You may be pushed down. You may be kept from rising. But no one can keep you from lifting your heart toward heaven-only you. It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says nothing good came of this is not yet listening.”
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“…Anything we can do from the soulful self will help lighten the burdens of the world. Anything. Let us not forget what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity can cause to be set in motion. Be outrageous in forgiving. Be dramatic in reconciling. Mistakes? Let’s back up and make them as right as we can, then move on. Be off the charts in kindness. In whatever we are called to, strive to be devoted to it in all aspects large and small. Fall short? Try again. Mastery is made in increments, not in leaps. Be brave, be fierce, be visionary. Mend the parts of the world that are “within our reach.” To strive to live this way is the most dramatic gift we can ever give to the world.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
“There is a prayer intended to give strength to people faced with circumstances they dont want to accept. The power of the prayer comes from it’s insight into human nature. Because so many of us rage against the hand that life has dealt us. Because so many of us are cowardly. And afraid to stand up for what is right. Because so many of us give into despair when faced with an impossible choice. The good news for those who utter these words is that God will hear you and answer your prayer. The bad news is that sometimes the answer is no.”
-Mary Alice, Desperate Housewives
“Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s heart.” -Elizabeth Elliot
Before you were conceived I wanted you Before you were born I loved you Before you were here an hour I would die for you This is the miracle of life. – Maureen Hawkins
“Here is another sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God, and the body in which it dwells is worth all it will cost, since it is the abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ’s name, I make a willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation my other darlings had left me. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother’s heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her tenderest cares, to her life-long prayers! Oh, how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!”
-Elizabeth Prentiss
“So when the devil throws your sins in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, tell him this: “I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is there I shall be also!”
– Martin Luther
“I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.”
-Booker T. Washington
We so often just go on with our lives and don’t live life in a way that shows that we have an awesome gift. When people look at us, they should be able to tell there is something different in our lives that gives us true joy :).
– amy elizabeth kenney
“Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.” (the Princess Bride, the movie)
What God saved you FOR supersedes anything God has saved you FROM.
“When I learn to say yes to God’s will I am no longer preoccupied with myself, my abilities or the dreams for my life. Letting go of my dreams means my future will not be the way I always expected it to be. Only then, when I have released my death grip on what I believe God should do, the way I believe He should do it, and when I believe it should happen, am I free to fully receive what God has for me. If God calls me to put my dreams on the alter, I need to trust Him to replace them or revive them in a way that makes the original pale by comparison.”
~Gary Mayes
“When I left Queen’s my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla.”
…
The joy of sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship were to be hers; nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy or her ideal world of dreams. And there was always the bend in the road! “‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,'” whispered Anne softly.
~Anne of Green Gables
“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” -C.S. Lewis
“Sometimes it makes me sad, though – Andy being gone. I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright, and when they fly away the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone. I guess I just miss my friend…” -from The Shawshank Redemption.
“It takes a lot of rain to make grass this green”
Angie Smith
“Do not worry; eat three square meals a day; say your prayers; be courteous to your creditors; keep your digestion good; exercise; go slow and easy. Maybe there are other things your special case requires to make you happy, but my friend, these I reckon will give you a good lift”. – Abraham Lincoln
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spread love everywhere you go: First of all in your own house…let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile. – Mother Teresa
“To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch…to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!” – Emerson
“Love is passion, obsession, someone you can’t live without. If you don’t start with that, what are you going to end up with? Fall head over heels. I say find someone you can love like crazy and who’ll love you the same way back. And how do you find him? Forget your head and listen to your heart. I’m not hearing any heart. Run the risk, if you get hurt, you’ll come back. Because, the truth is there is no sense living your life without this. To make the journey and not fall deeply in love – well, you haven’t lived a life at all. You have to try. Because if you haven’t tried, you haven’t lived.” William Parish – Meet Joe Black
“The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing… not healing, not curing… that is a friend who cares.” – Henri Nouwen
We encounter God in the ordinariness of life, not in search for spiritual highs and extraordinary mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life~Brennan Manning
“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour…If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? ~ Jane Eyre”
When all that I can bring is a broken Hallelujah,
When my only offering is shattered praise,
Still a song of adoration will rise up from these ruins
And I will worship You and give You thanks.
Even when my only praise is a broken Hallelujah ~Mandisa
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart.”~ Helen Keller
“Have courage for the great sorrows in life and patience for the small ones. And when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.” – Victor Hugo
“If you have a secret sorrow, a burden or a loss,
An aching need for healing… Hang it on the Cross.
If worry steals your sleep and makes you turn and toss,
If your heart is feeling heavy… Hang it on the Cross.”
God can never make us wine if we object to the fingers He uses to crush us with…..Oswald Chambers
The difference between and cow and a bean is a bean can begin an ADVENTURE!
(Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim)
Nine days, nine weeks, nine months… a mother’s heart knows not. For a mother’s love grows right from the start.
Every step I’m taking, every move I make feel lost with no direction, my faith is shaking but I gotta keep trying. Gotta keep my head held high. There’s gonna be another mountain, I’m always gonna wanna make it move. Always gonna be an uphill battle and sometimes I’m gonna have to lose. Ain’t about how fast I get there. Ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side. It’s the climb. ~Miley Cyrus
Faith is to Believe what you do not yet see, The reward of this Faith is to see what you Believe. ~ Saint Augustine
“I am overcome with all the pain & hurt in the world. But I am even more overcome that God chooses to do anything about it.” Paul Tilich
“love is the only flower that grows and blossoms without the aid of seasons.”~kahil gibran
“You are everything I never knew I always wanted” from “Fools Rush In”
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. –C.S. Lewis
Lemony Snicket: (narrating) We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.
We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.
– Francois de La Rochefoucauld
“The immigrant’s heart marches to the beat of two quite different drums, one from the old homeland and the other from the new. The immigrant has to bridge these two worlds, living comfortably in the new and bringing the best of his or her ancient identity and heritage to bear on life in an adopted homeland.”
– Irish President McAleese
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.- Helen Keller
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. ~The Beatles~
Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God. ~Corrie Ten Boom
“Do not be discouraged if you must climb a mountain to reach your heart’s desire. The view will enchant you to atone for your labors.”
~Robert Donlevy
“Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion”
~ Steel Magnolias
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’
~CS Lewis
“He foresaw my every fall, my every sin, my every backsliding; yet, nevertheless, fixed His heart upon me.”
~A.W. Pink
“I want all my senses to be engaged. Let me absorb the world’s variety and uniqueness.”
~ Maya Angelou
I have but one passion – it is He. He alone.
The world is the field, and the field is the world;
and henceforth, that country shall be my home
where I can be most used in winning souls for Christ.
~ Nicholuas Ludwig Zinzendorf
“The world is a book, and those that do not travel read only a page.”
~St. Augustine
“A man’s greatest care should be for that place where he dwells longest; therefore eternity should be his scope.”
~ Thomas Manton
“When you’ve been set free, you should act like it.” ~Brother Yun
“I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I do not feel it. I believe in God even when He is silent.”— Inscribed on cellar walls during the Holocaust in Cologne, GermanyWhen God takes someone from us, it is always for agood reason. When the sheep have grazed and thinned the grassin the lower regions, the shepherd will take a little lamb inhis arms, carry it up the mountain where the grass isgreen, lay it down, and soon the other sheep will follow.Every now and then our Lord takes a lamb from the parched fieldof a family up to those Heavenly Green Pastures, that the restof the family may keep their eyes on their true home and follow through.
–Fulton Sheen
Blessed are the cracked as they let The Light in.
“Unerring wisdom ordained your lot, and selected for you the safest and best condition. Remember this, had any other condition been better for you than the one in which you are, divine love would have put you there. You are placed by God in the most suitable circumstances. Be content with such things as you have, since the Lord has ordered all things for your good.”- Charles Haddon Spurgeon
“All things have a beginning and all things have a end — like a story and like a life. But no love ends.” Rachel Bonner, age 7
A woman is like a tea bag- you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.Eleanor Roosevelt
“When I start becoming the person God made me to be, I get to be me. I get to find out who that is and what that means and learn to be content with the unique things that have always been true, though long hidden by my sin. I get to enjoy the thumbprint of my maker that has long lain dormant instead of trying to be someone else. There is tremendous freedom in that.”-Jon Acuff of Stuff Christian’s Like.
C. H. Spurgeon.
“God is too good to be unkind, too wise to be mistaken, and when you cannot trace His Hand, you can always trust His Heart.”
This is All That I Can Say 
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