“What God gives in answer to our prayers will always be the thing we most urgently need, and it will always be sufficient.”

We can’t really tell how crooked our thinking is until we line it up with the straight edge of Scripture.

To love God is to love His will. It is to wait quietly for life to be measured by One who knows us through and through. It is to be content with His timing and His wise appointment.

If you believe in a God who controls the big things, you have to believe in a God who controls the little things. It is we, of course, to whom things look ‘little’ or ‘big’.

Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ”in spirit and in truth.” Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.

When ours are interrupted, his are not. His plans are proceeding exactly as scheduled, moving us always (including those minutes or hours or years which seem most useless or wasted or unendurable).

I believe with all my heart God’s Story has a happy ending. . . But not yet, not necessarily yet. It takes faith to hold on to that in the face of the great burden of experience, which seems to prove otherwise.

Teach me to treat all that comes to me with peace of soul and with firm conviction that Your will governs all.

It is always possible to be thankful for what is given rather than to complain about what is not given. One or the other becomes a habit of life.

The willingness to be and to have just what God wants us to be and have, nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else, would set our hearts at rest, and we would discover the simpler life, the greater peace.

No marriage can survive without forgiveness. Marriage is a long term commitment between two sinners.

Remind me that not everything needs to be said, and that there are very few things that need to be said by me.

I have one desire now – to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy and strength into it.

It is impossible to love deeply without sacrifice.

Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God is of a different nature altogether. It does not hate tragedy. It never denies reality. It stands in the very teeth of suffering.

Heaven is not here, it’s There. If we were given all we wanted here, our hearts would settle for this world rather than the next. God is forever luring us up and away from this one, wooing us to Himself and His still invisible Kingdom, where we will certainly find what we so keenly long for

Either we are adrift in chaos or we are individuals, created, loved, upheld and placed purposefully, exactly where we are. Can you believe that? Can you trust God for that?

When people say, ‘She’s got everything’, I’ve got one answer – I haven’t had tomorrow.

Won’t someone please answer my prayers before I’m old and gray. I’ve been lonely too long and all my family thinks I’m gay.

When you finally accept that it’s OK not to have answers and it’s OK not to be perfect, you realize that feeling confused is a normal part of what it is to be a human being.

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.

All life long, the same questions, the same answers.

All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.

When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles ’em.

What does it matter how long I pray, so long as my prayers are answered?