Love Is...

....if you try to abandon the pursuit of your full and lasting joy, you cannot love people or please God

....If love is the overflow of joy in God which gladly meets the needs of others, and if God loves such joyful givers, then this joy in giving is a Christian duty, and the effort not to pursue it is sin.

John Piper. DESIRING GOD: MEDITATIONS OF A CHRISTIAN HEDONIST.

What an Expert can do

Oddly, it is not real cooks who insist that the finest ingredients are necessary to produce a delicious something...Real cooks take stale bread and aging onions and make you happy.

Susan Wiegand. Cooking as Courtship. Quoted in Patches of Godlight: Father Tim's Favorite Quotes, compiled by Jan Karon.

Deconstruction vs Construction

In most cases, taking apart what exists proves easier than creating what does not yet exist.

Philip Yancey. RUMORS OF ANOTHER WORLD.

On Vision

God gives us the vision, then He takes us down to the valley to batter us into the shape of the vision, and it is in the valley that so many of us faint and give way. Every vision will be made real if we will have patience. Think of the enormous leisure of God! He is never in a hurry...

Let Him put you on His wheel and whirl you as He likes, and as surely as God is God and you are you, you will turn our exactly in accordance with the vision. Don't lose heart in the process.

Oswald Chambers. MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST. Vision and Reality. July 6th.

A Sunday Prayer

Give me grace for such an act of self-recollection as may again bring together the scattered forces of my soul.

Enable me to step aside for a little while from the busy life of common days and take thought about its meaning and end.

John Baillie. A DIARY OF PRIVATE PRAYER. Sunday, Morning.