SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: VOCATION

  • 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

  • The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else.

    —Fernando Pessoa (Book: The Book of Disquiet)

  • Most people are afraid to die because they’ve never lived. It’s actually the fear of life that paralyzes us. So we come to the end of our life and we feel like we never did what we’re supposed to do.

    —Erwin McManus

  • “If a man has no sense of meaning, he will numb himself with pleasure.”

    — Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
    (via Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy by Donald Miller)

  • “I don’t believe in marriage, and I have no time for it,” he said. “If you do what you really should do, you will have what you want.”

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • “Viri,” she said through the doorway, “but isn’t it better to be someone who follows her true life and is happy and generous, than an embittered woman who is loyal? Isn’t that so?”

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • Saint Luke associated sorrows with the personal Cross which we have to shoulder in our life and which distinguishes the way of Christ from other ways of living. He says, typically, in one of his sermons: ‘Our life, the life of each person, is sorrow and pain. All these sorrows in our social and family life are our Cross. A failed marriage, an unfortunate choice of profession, don’t they bring us pain and sorrow? Shouldn’t people who’ve suffered these calamities have to bear them bravely? Serious illnesses, contempt, dishonour, loss of personal wealth, jealousy between spouses, slander and, in general, all the wickedness that people do to us, aren’t they all our Cross? That’s exactly what our Cross is, the Cross of the vast majority of people. These are the sorrows that afflict people and we have to bear them, even though most people don’t want to. But even people who hate Christ and refuse to follow His way, they, too, have to shoulder their own Cross of pain. What’s the difference between them and Christians? The difference is that Christians shoulder the Cross with patience and don’t complain against God. Humbly, with eyes cast down, they bear it to the end of their lives, following the Lord Jesus Christ. They do it for Christ and His Gospel, they do it for fervent love of Him, but the whole of their thought is caught up in the Gospel teaching.

    —St. Luke the Surgeon

  • Trust Your Vocation

    You have to start trusting your unique vocation and allow it to grow deeper and stronger in you so it can blossom in your community. . . . Look at Rembrandt and van Gogh. They trusted their vocations and did not allow anyone to lead them astray. With true Dutch stubbornness, they followed their vocations from the moment they recognized them. They didn’t bend over backward to please their friends or enemies. Both ended their lives in poverty, but both left humanity with gifts that could heal the minds and hearts of many generations of people. Think of these two men and trust that you, too, have a unique vocation that is worth claiming and living out faithfully.

    —Henri Nouwen

  • Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord.” It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

    —C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

  • Abouna Matta had written the two brief pages of the Epilogue to Orthodox Prayer Life: The Interior Way on October 28, 1995. The coherent Coptic epilogist refers to Prayer: Access into the Father’s Presence, and tells of the Holy Spirit speaking within Christians and through them. The Holy Spirit “speaks words known well to those who have experienced him, hot and flaming words that set the whole body on fire. They make man forget his disability and insignificance, nearly lifting him off the ground. For the burden that weighed him down with sins and bound him to this earth disappears.

    ABOUNA MATTA EL MESKEEN
    CONTEMPORARY DESERT MYSTIC
    By John Watson

    COPTIC CHURCH REVIEW
    Volume 27, Numbers 3 & 4