Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.
. . . I don't have to worry about not meeting His expectations. God will ensure my success in accordance with His plan, not mine.
God has allowed hard things in your life so you can show the world that your God is great and that knowing Him brings peace and joy, even when life is hard.
If God cared only about religious activities, then the Pharisees would have been heroes of the faith.
People who are obsessed with God are known as givers, not takers. Obsessed people genuinely think that others matter as much as they do, and they are particularly aware of those who are poor around the world (James 2:14-26).
Churchgoers all across the nation say the Holy Spirit has entered them. They claim that God has given them a supernatural ability to follow Christ, put their sin to death, and serve the church. Christians talk about being born again say that they they were dead but now have come to life. We have become hardened to those words, but they are powerful words that have significant meaning. Yet when those outside the church see no difference in our lives, they begin to question our integrity, out sanity, or even worse, our God. And can you blame them?
A relationship with God simply cannot grow when money, sins, activities, favorite sports teams, addictions, or commitments are piled up on top of it.
The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself. . . Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act.
If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.
Sometimes I think I'm a nihilist because it doesn't matter, none of this matters. We're all following the will of some unknowable higher power, probably the stars manipulating our cellular magnets. We think we have all this agency, but do we? Do we really? Can you choose to be brave when you were born a coward? Can we be deprogrammed from the brainwashing that we grew up in? I think we can, but I think we need a lot of help.
Mary had a little sheep, With the sheep she went to sleep. The sheep turned out to be a ram, And Mary had a little lamb.