The Painful Reality of Sin

God, Life 0

If we think of hell as the state in which God allows the painful reality of sin to hit home, then we can understand both the terrible imagery used in Scripture to portray such a fate and the urgent warning to avoid the wide road that leads in that direction.  It also removes the objection that God is being presented as a cosmic torturer hurting people until they agree to follow him.  God does not torture anybody — he simply withdraws his protection that allows people to live under the illusions that sin is not necessarily harmful to a truly human life.  The natural (though none the less God-ordained) consequences of sin take their course, and it becomes harder and harder to fool oneself into believing the seductive lies of sin anymore.  In this way hell is educative and points us towards our need for divine mercy.

— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 136

Pain

God, Inspiration, Joy, Letting Go, Life, Trials 0

And so God must, from time to time, and sometimes very insistently, disrupt our lives so that we release our grasping of life here and now.  Usually through pain.  God is asking us to let go of the things we love and have given our hearts to, so that we can give our hearts even more fully to him.  He thwarts us in our attempts to make life work so that our efforts fail, and we must face the fact that we don’t really look to God for life.  Our first reaction is usually to get angry with him, which only serves to make the point.  Don’t you hear people say, “Why did God let this happen?” far more than you hear them say, “Why aren’t I more fully given over to God?”

We see God as a means to an end rather than the end itself.  God as the assistant to our life versus God as our life.  We don’t see the process of our life as coming to the place where we are fully his and he is our all.  And so we are surprised by the course of events.

It’s not that God doesn’t want us to be happy.  He does.  It’s just that he knows that until we are holy, we cannot really be happy. . . .

We are so committed to arranging for a happy little life that God has to thwart us to bring us back to himself. . . .

Now, I am not suggesting that God causes all the pain in our lives. . . .  But pain does come, and what will we do with it?  What does it reveal?  What might God be up to?  How might he redeem our pain?  those are questions worth asking.

Don’t waste your pain.

— John Eldredge, Walking with God, p. 87-88

Happily Ever After

Joy, Life, Love, Marriage 0

Every fairy tale, it seems, concludes with the bland phrase “happily ever after.”  Yet every couple I have ever known would agree that nothing about marriage is forever happy.  There are moments of bliss, to be sure, and lengthy spans of satisfied companionship.  yet these come at no small effort, and the girl who reads such fiction dreaming her troubles will end ere she departs the altar is well advised to seek at once a rational woman to set her straight.

— Princess Ben, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Never Abandoned

Core Value, God, Life 0

I don’t know how it matters; I only know that it does, that when we suffer, God suffers, and he will never abandon the smallest fragment of his creation. . . .  He will not give up on me, not now, not after my mortal death.  He will not give up on any of us, until we have become what he meant us to be.

— Madeleine L’Engle, A Severed Wasp, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 158

Sacred Romance

God, Joy, Life, Love 0

Indeed, if we will listen, a Sacred Romance calls to us through our heart every moment of our lives.  It whispers to us on the wind, invites us through the laughter of good friends, reaches out to us through the touch of someone we love.  We’ve heard it in our favorite music, sensed it at the birth of our first child, been drawn to it while watching the shimmer of a sunset on the ocean.  The Romance is even present in times of great personal suffering:  the illness of a child, the loss of a marriage, the death of a friend.  Something calls to us through experiences like these and rouses an inconsolable longing deep within our heart, wakening in us a yearning for intimacy, beauty, and adventure.

— John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 6-7

The Future Is Always Available.

Letting Go, Life, Trials, Trust 0

The past is irreparable; the future is always available.  In every case, when good dreams shatter, better ones are there to newly value and pursue. . . .

No matter what happens in life, a wonderful dream is available, always, that if pursued will generate an unfamiliar, radically new internal experience.  That experience, strange at first, will eventually be recognized as joy.

— Larry Crabb, Shattered Dreams, p. 53-54

Failure and Integrity

Letting Go, Life, Parenting, Teenagers 0

When teenagers let themselves fall short by failing to hold onto their integrity, they simultaneously have a tremendous opportunity to reaffirm themselves and their integrity.  That is, without failures, they do not learn how valuable their integrity is to their well-being.  And this is the ultimate paradox of successfully raising teenagers:  They need to experience a bunch of failures along the way to adulthood.  And how we handle their failures and how we teach them to address these missteps is crucial.

— Michael Riera, PhD, Staying Connected to Your Teenager, p. 155

God’s Timetable

God, Life, Trials 0

Did you realize that time could possibly be the stander’s greatest obstacle?  Charlyne could report, “Bob delivered hurricane supplies across the state today,” and be correct.  What she did not tell you was that it was a six-hour trip.  I encountered heavy traffic, post-hurricane congestion, rude drivers, and so much more.  The Bible is exactly like that.  We are told of an event, and assume it happened all at once, when in truth decades passed.  May we each learn that God’s timetable is far different from our timetable.

— Robert E. Steinkamp, The Prodigal’s Pen, p. 170

Let Our Light Shine

Life, Truth 0

Let us remember that we are not here to convince men, but to let our light shine.

Knowledge is not necessarily light.  And it is light, not knowledge, that we have to spread.  The best thing we can do — infinitely the best, indeed the only thing — that men may receive the truth, is to be ourselves true.  Beyond all doing of good is the being good, for he that is good not only does good things, but all that he does is good.

— George MacDonald, Your Life in Christ, p. 213