Joy Beyond the Sorrow

“When you stop trying to control your life and instead allow your anxieties and problems to bring you to God in prayer, you shift from worry to watching. You watch God weave his patterns in the story of your life.   Instead of trying to be out front, designing your life, you realize you are inside God’s drama.  As you wait, you begin to see him work, and your life begins to sparkle with wonder. You are learning to trust again.” —Paul Miller, A Praying Life, 73.

“Prayer is bringing your helplessness to Jesus.” —Paul Miller, A Praying Life, 55.

“Prayer is an expression of who we are . . . We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.” —Thomas Merton

Dear refuge of my weary soul,
On Thee, when sorrows rise
On Thee, when waves of trouble roll,
My fainting hope relies
To Thee I tell each rising grief,
For Thou alone canst heal
Thy Word can bring a sweet relief,
For every pain I feel

—Anne Steele

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in!”  —Jewel in C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle

“Over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living, which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward    uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.” —Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion

“The spiritual world cannot be made suburban. It is always frontier, and if we would live in it, we must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed.” —Howard R. Macy

“There is more
More than all this pain
More than all the falling down
And the getting up again
There is more
More than we can see
From our tiny vantage point
In this vast eternity
There is more

—Andrew Peterson

“My Dear Wormwood, I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian . . . There is no need to despair . . . One of our greatest allies at present in the Church itself . . . when he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with a rather oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.  When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided.  You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors.  Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew.  It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains.  You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side.  No matter.  You patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool.  Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous . . . Work hard, then, on the disappointment and anticlimax which certainly coming to the patient during his few weeks as a churchman.

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape”

—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Humility and love are precisely the graces which the men of the world can    understand, if they do not comprehend doctrines. They are the graces about which there is no mystery, and they are within reach of all classes… The poorest Christian can every day find occasion for practicing love and humility.” —J. C. Ryle

“If I cannot in honest happiness take the second place (or the twentieth); if I cannot take the first without making a fuss about my unworthiness, then I know nothing of Calvary love.”—Amy Carmichael

“The Church is the only institution that primarily exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.” —William Temple

“This life, therefore,
is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness,
not health, but healing,
not being but becoming,
not rest but exercise.
We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it,
the process is not yet finished, but it is going on,
this is not the end, but it is the road.
All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.”
—Martin Luther

“Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.  Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.” —Dallas Willard

“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, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; 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 fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and  timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”—Teddy Roosevelt

“There has been a long tradition which sees the mission of the Church primarily as obedience to a command.  It has been customary to speak of ‘the missionary mandate.’  This way of putting the matter is certainly not without justification, and yet it seems to me that it misses the point.  It tends to make mission a burden rather than a joy, to make it part of the law rather than part of the gospel.  If one looks at the New Testament evidence one gets another  impression.  Mission begins with a kind of explosion of joy.  The news that the rejected and crucified Jesus is alive is something that cannot possibly be suppressed.  It must be told.  Who could be silent about such a fact?  The   mission of the Church in the pages of the New Testament is more like the fallout from a vast explosion, a radioactive fallout which is not lethal but life-giving.”—Lesslie Newbigin

“In service which Thy will appoints, there are no bonds for me;
For my inmost heart is taught “the truth” that makes Thy children “free;”
And a life of self–renouncing love is a life of liberty.”
—Anna Waring