Everything beautiful is a bit of love frozen: the love that gives is to the gift as water is to ice. Ah, you should hear our torrent shout in the spring! The thought of God fills me so full of life, that I want to go and do something for everybody.
— George MacDonald, Warlock O’Glenwarlock, chapter 22, quoted in Discovering the Character of God, edited by Michael Phillips, p. 230.
We can pray until that day comes when every prayer will be an immediate incarnation, becoming reality even as we speak it, like creation became reality as God spoke it. For we are his sons and daughters, and he is maturing us to love all that he loves, and to do all that he does. To move mountains, and more.
— John Eldredge, Moving Mountains, p. 230
There are good things God must delay giving, until his child has a pocket to hold them — until God gets his child to make that pocket. God must first make him fit to receive and to have. There is no part of our nature that shall not be satisfied — and that not by lessening it, but by enlarging it to embrace an ever-enlarging enough.
— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, Third Series, “The Light,” quoted in Discovering the Character of God, edited by Michael Phillips, p. 156
God forgives everyone, he offers new possibilities to everyone, he showers his mercy on everyone who asks for it. We are the ones who do not know how to forgive.
— Pope Francis, The Name of God Is Mercy, p. 80
We have staked it all on this — that life wins. Oh, dear friends — life wins.
Life wins. Sometimes now, especially if we will pray. But life wins fully, and very soon.
Just as we must fix our eyes on Jesus when we pray, we must also fix our hearts on this one undeniable truth: life will win. When you know that unending joy is about to be yours, you live with such an unshakable confidence it will almost be a swagger. You can pray boldly, without fear, knowing that, “If this doesn’t work now, it will work totally and completely very soon.” We can have that kingdom attitude of Daniel’s friends, who said, “God is able to deliver, and he will deliver. But if not . . .” we will not lose heart. Period.
— John Eldredge, Moving Mountains, p. 228-229
Whatever seems to me darkness, that I will not believe of my God. If I should mistake, and call that darkness which is light, will he not reveal the matter to me, setting it in the light that lights every man, showing me that I saw but the husk of the thing, not the kernel? Will he not break open the shell for me, and let the truth of it, his thought, stream out upon me?
— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, Series Three, quoted in Discovering the Character of God, edited by Michael Phillips, p. 155
That is what God’s mercy is like: a great light of love and tenderness because God forgives not with a decree, but with a caress.
— Pope Francis, The Name of God Is Mercy, p. xvi
Realize that God loves you as an individual, not simply in the abstract. God cares about you personally, much as a close friend would. Remember how God speaks to you in personal, intimate ways, in your daily life and in prayer, which only you can appreciate. This is a sign of God’s personal love for you.
— James Martin, S. J., The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, p. 385.
As the love of him who is love transcends ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must God desire in his child infinitely more than the most conscientious and loving of mothers can desire in hers.
He would have his child rid of all discontentment, all fear, all grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all measuring of his own with a different gauge than he would apply to another’s. He will have no curling of the lip, no indifference toward any person, no desire to excel over another. He will not have him receive the smallest service without gratitude, would not hear from him a tone to jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache.
From such, as from all other sins, Jesus was born to deliver us — not primarily, or by itself, from the punishment of any of them. When all are gone, when the sin nature which causes them has been put to death and his Spirit substituted inside the part of our hearts that rules our deeds, then the holy punishment will have departed also.
He came to make us good, and therein blessed children.
— George MacDonald, Hope of the Gospel “Salvation from Sin,” quoted in Discovering the Character of God, edited by Michael Phillips, p. 41
The Lord never tires of forgiving: never! It is we who tire of asking him for forgiveness. We need to ask for the grace not to get tired of asking for forgiveness, because he never gets tired of forgiving.
— Pope Francis, The Name of God Is Mercy, p. xi