“Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day’s chalking.”
—Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace
Category: Uncategorized
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Whenever the process of the soul’s submission to God reaches its full stride, man will never be able to bear any pleasure, comfort, or corruptive seduction that draws him away from his state of submission to God and his enjoyment of his obedience to him. This is freedom, absolute freedom.
—Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life -
“Hurt people hurt people, but hurt people heal people, too.”
—Fr. Paul Girguis -
“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before.
Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant.
But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be… for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”
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It is hard to live in the present. The past and the future keep harassing us. The past with guilt, the future with worries. So many things have happened in our lives about which we feel uneasy, regretful, angry, confused, or, at least, ambivalent. And all these feelings are often colored by guilt. Guilt that says: “You ought to have done something other than what you did; you ought to have said something other than what you said.” These “oughts” keep us feeling guilty about the past and prevent us from being fully present to the moment.
Worse, however, than our guilt are our worries. Our worries fill our lives with “What ifs”: “What if I lose my job, what if my father dies, what if there is not enough money, what if the economy goes down, what if a war breaks out?” These many “ifs” can so fill our mind that we become blind to the flowers in the garden and the smiling children on the streets, or deaf to the grateful voice of a friend.
The real enemies of our life are the “oughts” and the “ifs.” They pull us backward into the unalterable past and forward into the unpredictable future. But real life takes place in the here and the now. God is a God of the present. God is always in the moment, be that moment hard or easy, joyful or painful. When Jesus spoke about God, he always spoke about God as being where and when we are. “When you see me, you see God. When you hear me you hear God.” God is not someone who was or will be, but the One who is, and who is for me in the present moment. That’s why Jesus came to wipe away the burden of the past and the worries for the future. He wants us to discover God right where we are, here and now.
—Henri Nouwen -
“I have never felt a sense of home anywhere I am. In fact, all I feel is a sense of longing for another place. A place I cannot name.”
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MR: Do you prefer to get more creative direction or do you want complete freedom?
BG: I actually like constraints. When I started casting in London, the budgets were often prohibitive. But I’ve always felt that the smaller the box, the more you have to get inventive—and the more solutions you need to find.
How to Cast for a Runway Show with Ben Grimes
SO GOOD QUOTES 