“God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination.”
—St. Augustine
Category: TRANSCIENCE
-
There is no better teacher than death. Have death before your minds: the time when you will leave this unreal world and will go to the other one, which is eternal.
—St. Cosmas Aitolos -
I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep…. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
May Sarton, The Journals of May Sarton Volume One: Journal of a Solitude, Plant Dreaming Deep, and Recovering -
Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time
-
I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life…I was people I hated and people I admired.
—Matt Haig, How to Stop Time -
In the end, both the optimist and the pessimist have it wrong, because each is looking at only part of the evidence. When we open our eyes to the fullness of reality, what we find is a chiaroscuro canvas of both darkness and light. The totality of evidence elicits in us something like ‘melancholic joy’: a grateful and uninhibited joy for the goodness of being, but one tinged by sadness at the pervasiveness of evil and melancholy because it all comes to an end. Seeing the evil in the world helps us to live well while we can, because death is coming for us all, and entropy is gnawing at the fringes of our existence. And seeing the goodness helps us to live gratefully, softening the sting of reality.
The ‘melancholic joy’ of living in our brutal, beautiful world -
Perhaps you look too much inwards on self, instead of outwards on the Lord Jesus.—The healthiest people do not think about their health; the weak induce disease by morbid introspection. If you begin to count your heartbeats, you will disturb the rhythmic action of the heart. If you continually imagine a pain anywhere, you will produce it. And there are some true children of God who induce their own darkness by morbid self-scrutiny. They are always going back on themselves, analyzing their motives, re-considering past acts of consecration, or comparing themselves with themselves. In one form or another self is the pivot of their life, albeit that it is undoubtedly a religious life. What but darkness can result from such a course? There are certainly times in our lives when we must look within, and judge ourselves, that we may not be judged. But this is only done that we may turn with fuller purpose of heart to the Lord. And when once done, it needs not to be repeated. “Leaving the things behind” is the only safe motto. The question is, not whether we did as well as we might, but whether we did as well as we could at the time.
We must not spend all our lives in cleaning our windows, or in considering whether they are clean, but in sunning ourselves in God’s blessed light. That light will soon show us what still needs to be cleansed away, and will enable us to cleanse it with unerring accuracy.
The Gift of Suffering
by F.B. Meyer -
We must learn to live each day, each hour, yes, each minute as a new beginning, as a unique opportunity to make everything new. Imagine that we could live each moment as a moment pregnant with new life. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises. Imagine that we could walk through the new year always listening to the voice saying to us: “I have a gift for you and can’t wait for you to see it!” Imagine.
Is it possible that our imagination can lead us to the truth of our lives? Yes, it can! The problem is that we allow our past, which becomes longer and longer each year, to say to us: “You know it all; you have seen it all, be realistic; the future will just be a repeat of the past. Try to survive it as best you can.” There are many cunning foxes jumping on our shoulders and whispering in our ears the great lie: “There is nothing new under the sun… don’t let yourself be fooled.”
When we listen to these foxes, they eventually prove themselves right: our new year, our new day, our new hour become flat, boring, dull, and without anything new.
So what are we to do? First, we must send the foxes back to where they belong: in their foxholes. And then we must open our minds and our hearts to the voice that resounds through the valleys and hills of our life saying: “Let me show you where I live among my people. My name is ‘God-with-you.’ I will wipe all the tears from your eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone” (Revelation 21:2–5).
—Henri Nouwen
-
“In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
SO GOOD QUOTES 