There is such a thing as anesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.
The well of your incompleteness runs deep, but make the effort to look away from yourself and to look toward Him.
If you are going to be used by God, He will take you through a number of experiences that are not meant for you personally at all. They are designed to make you useful in His hands, and to enable you to understand what takes place in the lives of others.
God is not concerned about our plans; He doesn’t ask, “Do you want to go through this loss of a loved one, this difficulty, or this defeat?” No, He allows these things for His own purpose. The things we are going through are either making us sweeter, better, and nobler men and women, or they are making us more critical and fault-finding, and more insistent on our own way. The things that happen either make us evil, or they make us more saintly, depending entirely on our relationship with God and its level of intimacy.
The remarkable thing about God is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else.
If we believe in Jesus, it is not what we gain but what He pours through us that really counts. God’s purpose is not simply to make us beautiful, plump grapes, but to make us grapes so that He may squeeze the sweetness out of us.
God is the Great Engineer, creating circumstances to bring about moments in our lives of divine importance, leading us to divine appointments
It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.
Now could you please ask these idiots to stop pointing their bullets at me? It's terribly wasteful.
Have enough sense to know, ahead of time, when your skills will not extend to wallpapering.
I have always tried to sense the mood of the people, their needs, their attitude toward ways to solve problems, their priorities. That's mainly what I go by. And I think that's the most important thing in any person's work, in the work that the people of Russia entrusted in me.