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

Books Confirm Your Own Opinion.

Books 0

But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.  Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.  You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.  A book, as it were, closes the book.

— The Queen, in The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett, p. 114

Love Changes Us.

Love 0

I had this unoriginal thought as I walked out the door and toward my van:  love changes us, makes us into people whom others then want to love.  That’s why, to those of us without it, love is the voice asking, What else?  What else?  And to those of us who have had love and lost it or thrown it away, then love is the voice that leads us back to love, to see if it might still be ours or if we’ve lost it for good.  For those of us who’ve lost it, love is also the thing that makes us speak in aphorisms about love, which is why we try to get love back, so we can stop speaking that way.  Aphoristically, that is.

— Sam Pulsifer, in An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke

So Many Books

Books, Reading 0

“Pass the time?” said the Queen.  “Books are not about passing the time.  They’re about other lives.  Other worlds.  Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it.  If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.”

— The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett, p. 29

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

Forgiveness and Repentance

Forgiveness 1

Repentance is important, even indispensable, and it is indispensable because forgiveness is an event between people, not just an individual’s change of feelings, attitudes, or actions.  Instead of being a condition of forgiveness, however, repentance is its necessary consequence.

If they imitate the forgiving God, forgivers will keep forgiving, whether the offenders repent or not.  Forgivers’ forgiving is not conditioned by repentance.  The offenders’ being forgiven, however, is conditioned by repentance — just as being given a box of chocolate is conditioned by receiving that box of chocolate.  Without repentance, the forgivers will keep forgiving but the offenders will remain unforgiven, in that they are untouched by that forgiveness.

Why?  Because they refuse to be forgiven. . . .  Unrepentant offenders implicitly say:  It’s wrong for you to forgive me; I’ve done you no wrong.  Or more brazenly, they say:  I don’t care if you forgive or not, because I don’t care whether I’ve wronged you or not.  Mostly, however, they say:  I am too ashamed of the wrongdoing I’ve committed to repent, too afraid of the consequences that may befall me.  In all three cases, forgiveness is rejected. . . .

That it is difficult to repent genuinely will not come as a surprise to those who have pondered the gravity and power of human sin.  One of sin’s most notable features is that it unfailingly refuses to acknowledge itself as sin.  We usually not only refuse to admit the wrongdoing and to accept guilt, but seem neither to detest the sin committed nor feel very sorry about it.  Instead, we hide our sin behind multiple walls of denial, cover-up, mitigating explanations, and claims to comparative innocence.

The accusations of others reinforce our propensity to hide sin.  We usually do all we can to justify ourselves, and that reaction is understandable.  We fear the consequences of sin.  We may lose a good reputation or be punished.  We cannot bear to face ourselves as wrongdoers.  We fear that the integrity of our very selves might crumble under the weight of our offense.  That’s why we are often able to repent only when we are assured that our guilt will be lifted and charges will not be pressed against us.  In other words, we are able to genuinely repent only when forgiveness has first been extended to us. . . .

Forgiveness does not cause repentance, but it does help make repentance possible.

— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 183-186