God Prepares Us Quotes

This is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.

Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do.

God has a prepared path for us to follow. We just have to read the omens he has left for us.

All of us prepare our own lunch. If we don't like our jobs, if we don't like the state of our relationships, if we don't like what's happening to our spiritual lives - we have no one to blame but ourselves. Because God has given us free will.

The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that.

Thanksgiving-giving thanks in everything-prepares the way that God might show us His fullest salvation in Christ.

God is in the résumé-building business. He is always using past experiences to prepare us for future opportunities.

Yesterday is gone and tomorrow has not yet come; we must live each day as if it were our last so that when God calls us we already, and prepared, to die with a clean heart.

God doesn't ask that we succeed in everything, but that we are faithful. However beautiful our work may be, let us not become attached to it. Always remain prepared to give it up, without losing your peace.

I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange? Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel to cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who are fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back worse.

Do not worry in the least about yourself, leave all worry to God,' - this appears to be the commandment in all religions. This need not frighten anyone. He who devotes himself to service with a clear conscience, will day by day grasp the necessity for it in greater measure, and will continually grow richer in faith. The path of service can hardly be trodden by one who is not prepared to renounce self-interest, and to recognize the conditions of his birth. Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make not only for our own happiness but that of the world at large.

If we believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the only begotten Son of God and that He came into this world and went to the cross of Calvary and died for our sins and rose again in order to justify us and to give us life anew and prepare us for heaven-if you really believe that, there is only one inevitable deduction, namely that He is entitled to the whole of our lives, without any limit whatsoever.

Our humility before God has no value, except that it prepares us to reveal the humility of Jesus to our fellow men.

Our days are numbered. One of the primary goals in our lives should be to prepare for our last day. The legacy we leave is not just in our possessions, but in the quality of our lives. What preparations should we be making now? The greatest waste in all of our earth, which cannot be recycled or reclaimed, is our waste of the time that God has given us each day.

I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work. He will give us to do.

Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.

It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply." God actually rises up storms of conflict in relationships at times in order to accomplish that deeper work in our character. We cannot love our enemies in our own strength. This is graduate-level grace. Are you willing to enter this school? Are you willing to take the test? If you pass, you can expect to be elevated to a new level in the Kingdom. For He brings us through these tests as preparation for greater use in the Kingdom. You must pass the test first.

God’s love sets us free from the need to seek approval. Knowing that we are loved by God, accepted by God, approved by God, and that we are new creations in Christ empowers us to reject self-rejection and embrace a healthy self-love. Being secure in God’s love for us, our love for Him, and our love for ourselves, prepares us to fulfill the second greatest commandment: To love our neighbor as ourselves.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.

Shall I think that the Creator has made man so as to leave him to debate endlessly in the intellectual miseries that surround us? I cannot believe this: God prepares a firmer and calmer future for European societies; I am ignorant of his designs, but I will not cease to believe in them [merely] because I cannot penetrate them, and I would rather doubt my enlightenment than his justice.

Most of us love a non-self, or something extrinsic and apart from our inner life; but a mother's love during the time she is a flesh-and-blood ciborium is not for a non-self but for one that is her very self, a perfect example of charity and love which hardly perceives a separation. Motherhood then becomes a kind of priesthood. She brings God to man by preparing the flesh in which the soul will be implanted; she brings man to God in offering the child back again to the Creator.

If you have ever seen the play Peter Pan you will remember how the pirate chief was always making his dying speech because he was afraid that possibly when the time came for him to die he might not have time to get it off his chest. It is much the same with me, and so, although I am not at this moment dying, I shall be doing so one of these days and I want to send you a parting word of goodbye. Remember, it is the last you will ever hear from me, so think it over. I have had a most happy life and I want each one of you to have as happy a life too. I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life. Happiness doesn't come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy, so that you can be useful and so can enjoy life when you are a man. Nature study will show you how full of beautiful and wonderful things God has made the world for you to enjoy. Be contented with what you have got and make the best of it. Look on the bright side of things instead of the gloomy one. But the real way to get happiness is by giving out happiness to other people. Try and leave this world a little better than you found it and when your turn come to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best. "Be Prepared" in this way, to live happy and to die happy—stick to your Scout promise always—even after you have ceased to be a boy—and God help you do it.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and worthy of a man of this age to hold a position from which he receives a salary disproportionate to his work; to take from the people--often in poverty--taxes to be spent on constructing cannon, torpedoes, and other instruments of butchery, so as to make war on people with whom we wish to be at peace, and who feel the same wish in regard to us; or to receive a salary for devoting one's whole life to constructing these instruments of butchery, or to preparing oneself and others for the work of murder.

As we wait, God reveals his purpose in the preparations he is doing within us, and our hopeful outlook is the result.

God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard. Our preparations to receive Him sometimes have the opposite effect.

My grandmother used to say God gives us drought years-years drained of happiness-to prepare us for bounteous times. I'm more than ready for bounty.

These [the armed forces] are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where.... Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises.

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong. How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange? Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.

One cannot simply read the Bible, like other books. One must be prepared really to enquire of it. Only thus will it reveal itself. Only if we expect from it the ultimate answer, shall we receive it. That is because in the Bible God speaks to us. And one cannot simply think about God in one’s own strength, one has to inquire of him. Only if we seek him, will he answer us.

When God issues a call to us, it is always a holy call. The vocation of dying is a sacred vocation. To understand that is one of the most important lessons a Christian can ever learn. When the summons comes, we can respond in many ways. We can become angry, bitter or terrified. But if we see it as a call from God and not a threat from Satan, we are far more prepared to cope with its difficulties.

Everything is interim. Everything is a path or a preparation for the next thing, and we never know what the next thing is. Life is like that, of course, twisty and surprising. But life with God is like that exponentially. We can dig in, make plans, write in stone, pretend we're not listening, but the voice of God has a way of being heard. It seeps in like smoke or vapor even when we've barred the door against any last-minute changes, and it moves us to different countries and different emotional territories and different ways of living. It keeps us moving and dancing and watching, and never lets us drop down into a life set on cruise control or a life ruled by remote control. Life with God is a dancing dream, full of flashes and last-minute exits and generally all the things we've said we'll never do. And with the surprises comes great hope.

All men will die. All men will be called upon to pass through the veil. But only a few, only a few special men, only those who have been worthy to answer a calling from God, are given the honor to die for a cause. And in this life, in these times, all of us will be called on to make a sacrifice. When, or in what manner that sacrifice may be required, only God knows. All we can do is wait and prepare and pray that when our time comes, we will be ready to complete the task that he gives, so that when it is over, when we have done all we could, we might look to the Lord and say the same words he said : 'I have fought my way through, I have finished the work Thou didst give me to do.

God doesn't always give us enough peace and enough strength to save up and prepare for the future, but always, if we are willing to accept it, he gives us strength and peace sufficient to get through one day at a time.

Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself. Swell with pride and gratitude, for you are tiny and given much. You are as spoken by God as the stars.

As God nurtures, protects, prepares, and initiates us, he restores us to the truth of who we are and the reality of the life we are living and meant to live.

Thanks be to God, Who gives us suffering as sacred remedy for all our sins, that best and purest essence which prepares the strong in spirit for divine delights!

Thomas was still outside, so I knocked once and opened the door without waiting for a response. Loki was in the middle of changing clothes as I came in. He'd already traded his worn slacks for a pair of pajama pants, and he was holding a white T-shirt, preparing to put it on. He had his back to me, and it was even worse than I'd thought. "Oh, my god, Loki," I gasped. "I didn't know you were coming." He turned around to face me, smirking. "Shall I leave the shirt off, then?" "No, put the shirt on," I said, and I closed the door behind me so nobody could see or overhear us talking. "You're no fun." He wrinkled his nose and pulled the shirt over his head. "Your back is horrific." "And I was just going to tell you how beautiful you look today, but I'm not going to bother now if you're going to talk that way." Loki sat back down on his bed, more lying than sitting.

They settled the question, by deciding that misfortunes most commonly happen to us from our own misconduct or imprudence; but sometimes from causes independent of ourselves; that the most innocent and prudent conduct cannot always preserve us from them; and that, whether they arise from our own fault or not, trust in God softens them, and renders them useful in preparing us for a better life.

Poor kids, through no fault of their own, are less prepared by their families, their schools, and their communities to develop their God-given talents as fully as rich kids. For economic productivity and growth, our country needs as much talent as we can find, and we certainly can’t afford to waste it. The opportunity gap imposes on all of us both real costs and what economists term “opportunity costs.

If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks. Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt.

We must be so careful that we do not refuse the cross that the Lord has given us to carry. Let us remember that our present sufferings serve to prepare us for entering into the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.

A god who gave us everything we wanted would be the most malevolent god of all. With an infantile curiosity, we insist on tasting the cockroach on the floor while our father is preparing a magnificent feast for us.

God always prepare us for the great mission but we are unaware. All the stages are connected; we must graciously be fully present in each stage.

But I know Jesus arose. I feel his presence now, here, with me. I see the evidence of his Word everyday. From creation forth, the whole world is witness to God's plan revealed through his Son. From the beginning, he prepared us. In the passing of the seasons; in the way flowers spring forth, die, and drop seeds for life to begin again; in the sunset and sunrise. Jesus' sacrifice is reenacted every day of our lives if we but have the eyes to see.

Each of us has been created by a holy God with love, on purpose and for a purpose. But so many of us feel afraid or unprepared. This is the secret, though: No one is prepared enough. No one is perfectly ready.

Our faith is concentrated in the Son of God, and through him in the Father; and the Holy Ghost is their minister to bring truths to our remembrance, to reveal new truths to us, and teach, guide, and direct the course of every mind, until we become perfected and prepared to go home, where we can see and converse with our Father in Heaven.

He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived. He is now supervising the entire course of world history (Rev. 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2). He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life. Let us now hear his teachings on who has the good life, on who is among the truly blessed.

Prepare us for what?” Holden asked. “To poke gods with a sharp stick?” “No, Captain Holden. No sticks,” Duarte said. “When you fight gods, you storm heaven.

Sometimes what appears to be a setback is God's mode of elevation.

Don't be concerned with other women's beauty. Only admire God's amazing work and wish them well., this earth was made to bite us in half and grind us to bone, but we were made to be kind.

We gave ourselves for lost men, and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who "showeth His wonders in the deep"; beseeching Him of His mercy, that as in the beginning He discovered the face of the deep, and brought forth dry land, so He would now discover land to us, that we might not perish.

I believe in god. I also believe that you should never ask god to make your dreams come true. You have to work for your dreams. And dream actually, with all your mind body and soul. I don’t believe luck is when a super power grants us what we wished for. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. So we need to be prepared all the time. Our dream awaits us. It’s already on its way. We just need to be prepared when it gets to us.

The Shepherd knows our path. And He also knows His sheep and what it takes to prepare us for the journey. And so the Shepherd makes us lie down to fortify us for the trek. He makes certain we won't tire, that we're not at risk because of weariness, that we're invigorated from our pasture-time for any strenuous climb. With His eye on tomorrow, He leads on today.

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.

Grace works ahead of us to draw us toward faith, to begin its work in us. Even the first fragile intuition of conviction of sin, the first intimation of our need of God, is the work of preparing, prevening grace, which draws us gradually toward wishing to please God. Grace is working quietly at the point of our desiring, bringing us in time to despair over our own unrighteousness, challenging our perverse dispositions, so that our distorted wills cease gradually to resist the gift of God.

One of the great truths of the Bible is that whenever God gets ready to do anything in the earth, He always works through a person or a group of people whom He has called and who have willingly responded to Him. The human factor is key for God’s activity on the earth. When God prepared to deliver the Israelites from Egypt, He called Moses. When He got ready to rescue His people from the Midianites, He called Gideon. When God wanted to warn His disobedient people of His judgment and call them back to Him, He called Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and the other prophets. When God was ready to send His Son into the world, He chose Mary, a humble peasant girl, to be His mother. When Jesus Christ prepared to send His message of salvation throughout the world, He called and anointed men and women—His Church—and commissioned them for the mission. This illustrates an incredible principle under which God operates: Without God we cannot, and without us God will not. For everything that God desires to do in the earth, He enters into partnership with those to whom He has already given dominion.

God's fighting for us does not exclude the responsibility to be prepared for battle both in the area of strategy and in equipment. Trusting God completely in prayer, believing that He is able to do all things, does not remove the need to pray for His strength to accomplish what He has prepared us to do! We are to do what He is unfolding for us to do, fulfilling what God is giving us strength to do, acknowledging that it is His strength and not ours. It is a truly active passive, not a false whining humbleness that says, 'I can't do anything; I'm too weak.

If you have an earnest desire towards philosophy, prepare yourself from the very first to have the multitude laugh and sneer, and say, "He is returned to us a philosopher all at once; "and "Whence this supercilious look?" Now, for your part, do not have a supercilious look indeed; but keep steadily to those things which appear best to you, as one appointed by God to this particular station. For remember that, if you are persistent, those very persons who at first ridiculed will afterwards admire you. But if you are conquered by them, you will incur a double ridicule.

a spider and a fly i heard a spider and a fly arguing wait said the fly do not eat me i serve a great purpose in the world you will have to show me said the spider i scurry around gutters and sewers and garbage cans said the fly and gather up the germs of typhoid influenza and pneumonia on my feet and wings then i carry these germs into households of men and give them diseases all the people who have lived the right sort of life recover from the diseases and the old soaks who have weakened their systems with liquor and iniquity succumb it is my mission to help rid the world of these wicked persons i am a vessel of righteousness scattering seeds of justice and serving the noblest uses it is true said the spider that you are more useful in a plodding material sort of way than i am but i do not serve the utilitarian deities i serve the gods of beauty look at the gossamer webs i weave they float in the sun like filaments of song if you get what i mean i do not work at anything i play all the time i am busy with the stuff of enchantment and the materials of fairyland my works transcend utility i am the artist a creator and demi god it is ridiculous to suppose that i should be denied the food i need in order to continue to create beauty i tell you plainly mister fly it is all damned nonsense for that food to rear up on its hind legs and say it should not be eaten you have convinced me said the fly say no more and shutting all his eyes he prepared himself for dinner and yet he said i could have made out a case for myself too if i had had a better line of talk of course you could said the spider clutching a sirloin from him but the end would have been just the same if neither of us had spoken at all boss i am afraid that what the spider said is true and it gives me to think furiously upon the futility of literature archy

The Bible offers a beautiful passage from the heart of one who knew much, suffered much, endured much, and wrote much: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceivedwhat God has prepared for those who love him.” 1 CORINTHIANS 2:9

All the blessings God has prepared for us, His children, are received through our prayers

God prepared us for the task ahead of time.

When we devote ourselves to this rational preparation and study, we are worshipping God with our mind, the very thing He has called us to do (Matt. 22:37).

I have been corrupted as much as anyone else by the vast number of menial services which our society has grown to expect and depend on. We should do for ourselves or let the machines do for us, the glorious technology that is supposed to be the new light of the world. We are like a man who has bought a great amount of equipment for a camping trip, who has the canoe and the tent and the fishing lines and the axe and the guns, the mackinaw and the blankets, but who now, when all the preparations and the provisions are piled expertly together, is suddenly too timid to set out on the journey but remains where he was yesterday and the day before and the day before that, looking suspiciously through the white lace curtains at the clear sky he distrusts. Our great technology is a God-given chance for adventure and for progress which we are afraid to attempt. Our ideas and our ideals remain exactly what they were and where they were three centuries ago. No. I beg your pardon. It is no longer safe for a man to even declare them!

Make a ritual ablution before each prayer, beginning every action with "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful." First wash your hands, intending to pull them away from the affairs of this world. Then wash your mouth, remember and reciting God's name, purifying it in order to utter His Name. Wash your nose wishing to inhale the perfumes of the Divine. Wash your face feeling shame, and intending to wipe from it arrogance and hypocrisy. Wash your forearms trusting God to make you do what is good. Wet the top of your head feeling humility and wash your ears (in preparation) to hear the address of your Lord. Wash from your feet the dirt of the world so that you don't stain the sands of Paradise. Then thank and praise the Lord, and send prayers of peace and blessing upon our Master, who brought the canons of Islam and taught them to us. After you leave the place of your ablution without turning your back to it, perform two cycles of prayer out of hope and thankfulness for His making you clean. Next, stand in the place where you are going to make your prayers as if between the two hands of your Lord. Imagine, without forms and lines, that you are facing the Ka'bah, and that there is no one else on the face of this earth but you. Bring yourself to express your servanthood physically. Choose the verses you are going to recite, understanding their meanings within you. With the verses that start with "Say..." feel that you are talking to your Lord as He wishes you to do: let every word contain praise. Allow time between the sentences, contemplating what our Master, the Messenger of God, gave us, trying to keep it in your heart. Believing that your destiny is written on your forehead, place it humbly on the floor in prostration. When you finish and give salutations to your right and to your left, keep your eyes on yourself and your connection with your Lord, for you are saluting the One under whose power you are and who is within you...

Sometimes what we see as wasted time is actually the training ground for what God has in store for us. The lessons we learn and the obstacles we overcome are preparation. Even the rocks you’re struggling to climb over today may be the stepping-stones of tomorrow. God never wastes anything. There is great value in where he has led you.

Shabbat comes with its own holiness; we enter not simply a day, but an atmosphere. My father cites the Zohar: the Sabbath is the name of God. We are within the Sabbath rather than the Sabbath being within us. For my father, the question is how to perceive that holiness: not how much to observe, but how to observe. Strict adherence to the laws regulating Sabbath observance doesn’t suffice; the goal is creating the Sabbath as a foretaste of paradise. The Sabbath is a metaphor for paradise and a testimony to God’s presence; in our prayers, we anticipate a messianic era that will be a Sabbath, and each Shabbat prepares us for that experience: “Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath … one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.” It was on the seventh day that God gave the world a soul, and “[the world’s] survival depends upon the holiness of the seventh day.” The task, he writes, becomes how to convert time into eternity, how to fill our time with spirit: “Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.

For God does not give us anything in order that we should enjoy its possession and rest content with it, nor has he ever done so. All the gifts which he has ever granted us in heaven or on earth were made solely in order to be able to give us the one gift, which is himself. With all other gifts he simply wants to prepare us for that gift which is himself. And all the works which God has ever performed in heaven or on earth served solely to perform the one work, that is to sanctify himself so that he can sanctify us. And so I tell you that we should learn to see God in all gifts and works, neither resting content with anything nor becoming attached to anything. For us there can be no attachment to a particular manner of behaviour in this life, nor has this ever been right, however successful we may have been.

As I have said, the Bible consistently changes the questions we bring to the problem of pain. It rarely, or ambiguously, answers the backward-looking question “Why?” Instead, it raises the very different, forward-looking question, “To what end?”We are not put on earth merely to satisfy our desires, to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.We are here to be changed, to be made more like God in order to prepare us for a lifetime with him. And that process may be served by the mysterious pattern of all creation: pleasure sometimes emerges against a background of pain, evil may be transformed into good, and suffering may produce something of value.

After defending the value of prepared prayers, the author cautions against over-reliance on them. Just as David could not fight in the armor of King Saul, we are called to fight in the way God has equipped us uniquely.

Christians must show that misery fits the good for heaven, while happiness prepares the bad for hell; that the wicked get all their good things in this life, and the good all their evil; that in this world God punishes the people he loves, and in the next, the ones he hates; that happiness makes us bad here, but not in heaven; that pain makes us good here, but not in hell. No matter how absurd these things may appear to the carnal mind, they must be preached and they must be believed. If they were reasonable, there would be no virtue in believing. Even the publicans and sinners believe reasonable things. To believe without evidence, or in spite of it, is accounted as righteousness to the sincere and humble christian. In short, Christians are expected to denounce all pleasant paths and rustling trees, to curse the grass and flowers, and glorify the dust and weeds. They are expected to malign the wicked people in the green and happy fields, who sit and laugh beside the gurgling springs or climb the hills and wander as they will. They are expected to point out the dangers of freedom, the safety of implicit obedience, and to show the wickedness of philosophy, the goodness of faith, the immorality of science and the purity of ignorance.

Many people today struggle to hear God's voice. Too often, we expect to hear Him in the thundering of majestic words, when He often chooses to speak in a soft, gentle whisper. But He does speak! He speaks to us when we pray and when we read His Word. He also speaks through His Church and godly counsel. But He will only speak to a heart that has been prepared to receive all that He wants to share, one that is filled with brokenness, repentance, and expectation.

The refining of our characters is very essential to God’s plan for our lives. God cannot use a proud woman (or man). Being taken through a preparation process presses and purges out impurities of the heart and spirit, such as pride, rebellion, selfishness, and bitterness, so that we can be pliable in the hands of the Lord to follow His lead to fulfill our purposes. We can’t be an effective vessel with baggage weighing on us, effecting our ability to hear and obey God.

Our Heavenly Father loves each one of us and understands that this process of climbing higher takes preparation, time, and commitment. He understands that we will make mistakes at times, that we will stumble, that we will become discouraged and perhaps even wish to give up and say to ourselves it is not worth the struggle. We know it is worth the effort, for the prize, which is eternal life, is “the greatest of all the gifts of God.” And to qualify, we must take one step after another and keep going to gain the spiritual heights we aspire to reach.

Amazing that we made Jesus into the consummate answer giver because that is not what he usually does. He more often leads us right onto the horns of our own human-made dilemmas, where we are forced to meet God and be honest with ourselves. He creates problems for us more than resolves them, problems that very often cannot be resolved by all-or-nothing thinking but only by love and forgiveness.

You and I were put on this earth to serve something greater than our narrow interests. When our focus becomes self-centered instead of God-centered we lose our greatest source of power. Our God-given talents are meant to benefit others. When we use them for that greater purpose, we put faith into action to fulfill His plan for us. We make a difference in this world that helps prepare us for the next.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss. Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But we've never lost an astronaut in flight. We've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle. But they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together. For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, "Give me a challenge, and I'll meet it with joy." They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us. We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and, perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers. And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them. I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program. And what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue. I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA, or who worked on this mission and tell them: "Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it." There's a coincidence today. On this day three hundred and ninety years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, "He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it." Well, today, we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete. The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God." Thank you.

There is a deep and natural craving in the human heart that can be satisfied nowhere except in God. Our being in this world is a test, a preparation for the deepest state of spiritual communion. But most of us, suppressing our deepest longings and disdaining God, seek satisfaction from this world. Such a path can lead only to despair.

I think that is why—why God allows hard things in life. To prepare us. To knock off rough edges—pride, bias, envy, selfishness—so that when we get to heaven we will be more in tune—more able to enjoy the beautiful things we’ll find there. Maybe that’s what the rewards will be. A deeper appreciation of what we are given—what we are a part of.

The weathermen warn us for days of the impending snowstorm that's to arrive Thursday night. The grocery stores have run out of bottle water as people prepare to take shelter in their homes; my God, I think, it's winter, an annual certainty, not the atomic bomb.

If we never get out of our comfort zones we can’t grow into the places God has prepared for us.

We rise up to God in pride, while God descends to us in humility.

. . sometimes God’s ways are not our ways, so we have to be prepared for Him to do something we might not like, but still trust Him to get us where He wants us.

If God created us to do good works of eternal significance, he would not create us ill-prepared for those tasks.

! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.

When we are brought low, that's when God is preparing us

Thanksgiving—giving thanks in everything—prepares the way that God might show us His fullest salvation in Christ.

God does not exist for us; we exist for God.

This is going to be hideously trite,” he says. “Prepare yourself.” “Prepared.” “It’s Christmas. You love them. They love you. More than anything else, that’s what matters. Things will happen the way they happen, and you’ll sort out the way you feel about them, and it will be all right. And you’ll keep loving them, and they’ll keep loving you, and … God bless us, everyone.” I consider this. “Kind of a weak ending.” “I can’t help suspecting it would have resonated more if I were a sickly child in Victorian Britain,” he agrees wistfully.

My earnest prayer is that the blessings of our God may be over us in time, that when we get through and shall pass behind the veil, we shall have done all that was required of us, and be prepared to dwell with the sanctified and the just made perfect through the blood of the Lamb.

God never promised us an easy life. He never promised that we wouldn’t suffer, that we wouldn’t feel despair and loneliness and confusion and desperation. What he did promise was that in our suffering we would never be alone. And though we may sometimes make ourselves blind and deaf to his presence he is beside us and around us and within us always. We are never separated from his love. And he promised us something else, the most important promise of all. That there would be surcease. That there would be an end to our pain and our suffering and our loneliness, that we would be with him and know him, and this would be heaven. This man, who in life may have felt utterly alone, feels alone no more. This man, whose life may have been days and nights of endless waiting, is waiting no more. He is where God always knew he would be, in a place prepared. And for this we rejoice.

...Our character was being forged on the anvil of the difficult experiences we were facing. We knew that if we remained committed to God's purposes for us, we would be prepared to face the future.

Our success in life is determined by one primary objective: how functionally transformed into Christ's likeness have we become? If He sees that we were forgiving even when wounded; if He sees in us a heart that holds fast its faith even in times of adversity; if He finds us to be truly repentant and genuinely humble, even when we could boast; and if He sees we are... committed to a life of love, we will have fulfilled the purpose of God. We will receive a great reward. If, however, the Lord sees in us a soul easily offended or that we blame others for our joyless, angry attitude; if He scans our inner man and finds we are self-righteous and judgmental; or if our conscience alternately either accuses or defends ourselves, then we will render an account for our life at the judgment seat of Christ (Rom. 1:29, 2:5; 2 Cor. 5:10; Heb. 9:27). Thus, it is of the utmost importance that we settle the eternal goal for our lives. Are we seizing life's opportunities to appropriate Christ or are we mostly coasting? Let us say with vision and assurance, I am preparing myself for God.

God prepares leaders in a crockpot, not a microwave. More important than the awaited goal is the work God does in us while we wait. Waiting deepens and matures us, levels our perspective, and broadens our understanding. Tests of time determine whether we can endure seasons of seemingly unfruitful preparation, and indicate whether we can recognize and seize the opportunities that come our way.

Sometimes we are so taken up with the world, or with our own plans and selves, that we haven’t given a thought to God, and He just had to take away the thing in which we were interested to make us give our attention to Him, that we might know His will and get the full blessing He has prepared for us.

They are human,” Magnus said. “It is not in their capability to understand that which by its nature is almost beyond understanding. They see demons as what they fight. They forget that there are unimaginable forces that can bend the laws of the universe. The gods are walking, Malcom, and none of us are prepared.

They are human," Magnus said. "It is not in their capability to understand that which by its nature is almost beyond understanding. They see demons as what they fight. They forget that there are unimaginable forces that can bend the laws of the universe. The gods are walking, Malcolm, and none of us are prepared.

Fasting and prayer are a means through which we open ourselves to God, Who can cleanse us of all the sins of our past. Alone we cannot help ourselves and without prayer and fasting, we cannot recognize the evil that wants to destroy us. Preparation of hearts for cooperation with God takes place in prayer and fasting.

To know that our Father in heaven has ordained our pain is not a comfoftable truth, but it is comforting. That our pain has a loving and wise and all-powerful purpose behind it is better than any other view--weak God, cruel God, bumbling God, no God. To know that in his hands "this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Corinthians 4:17) is profoundly reassuring.

Repentance prepares the way and makes the road of our hearts straight. Repentance builds up every low place and takes down every high place in our lives and church families. Repentance prepares us for His presence.

Perhaps you'd like, you gentle fellow, To hear what I'm prepared to say On "kinfolk" and their implications? Well, here's my view of close relations: They're people whom we're bound to prize, To honor, love, and idolize, And following the old tradition, To visit come the Christmas feast, Or send a wish by mail at least; All other days they've our permission, To quite forget us if they please- So grant them, God, long life and ease!

We didn't try to force God's hand or do the "I just heard a sermon about David and Goliath so I need to quit my job right this second" leap of faith that's so popular in Christian circles. We took our time with the decision, like another guy in the Bible, named Jesus. He spent thirty years in obscurity before he started his adventure. Often, we're not willing to spend thirty minutes in preparation, never mind thirty years, especially when we come home from a conference and find our day jobs waiting for us on Monday morning. I'm not sure why Christians sometimes think the maturation of our own missions will be radically shorter than that of Jesus. But it happens and in the past I've certainly wanted to take wild, unplanned, possibly-not-inspired-by-God leaps of faith.

You don’t have to seek anyone else’s approval for the life God has given you to live. You don’t have to apologize for the strength, fortitude, courage, talent, beauty, or intellect your Creator has given you. Ladies, we all are “God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).

How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the centre of the universe…Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams.

Everything we encounter today is used by God to prepare us for tomorrow. he wastes no trials, withholds no blessings, nor does he hold back on the discipline of his soldiers. All He does prepares us for future usefulness as vessels of honor.

 We have no right to decide where we should be placed, or to have preconceived ideas as to what God is preparing us to do. God engineers everything; and wherever He places us, our one supreme goal should be to pour out our lives in wholehearted devotion to Him in that particular work. “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might . . .” (Ecclesiastes 9:10).

I did not know then, however, as I do now, the strongest reason for distrust. The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us up big before they prick us.

The fact is that, whether it is us or someone else going through a trial, Jesus does not necessarily save us from every difficult situation. But he does promise to pray us through to victory. He prays that our faith will be more than a match to stand our ground, when the enemy takes a shot at us. So, be patient, and let Jesus use whatever is at his disposal to get you through into his purpose and calling for your life. It's not what's happening now that's important, but what God has prepared for your future that counts.

Each of us struggles through primary and essential questions that we cannot avoid once we reach or approach maturity. Why was I born? What is the meaning of life, and its purpose? Where and how can I find happiness? Why is life so full of pain and difficulty? How should we live, by what model or principles or arrangements? A great mystery embraces our lives, John Paul said. Then he added something that has been to me deeply inspiring: These questions we ask do not come only from your restless mind, and are not just products of your very human anxiety. They come from God. They are the beginning of the process by which you find them. God prompts them. He made you ask. The questions are, in fact, a kind of preparation for God, a necessary preamble to the story he wants to write on your heart. And the moment you ask them, your freedom has been set in motion. You become more sharply aware that there are choices. This, in a way, is the beginning of morality, because there is no morality without freedom. Only in freedom can you turn toward what is good. (p. 127)

O that Christians would learn to live with one eye on Christ crucified and the other on his coming in glory! If everlasting joys were more in your thoughts, spiritual joys would abound more in your hearts. No wonder you are comfortless when heaven is forgotten. When Christians let fall their heavenly expectations but heighten their earthly desires, they are preparing themselves for fear and trouble. Who has met with a distressed, complaining soul where either a low expectation of heavenly blessings, or too high a hope for joy on earth is not present? What keeps us under trouble is either we do not expect what God has promised, or we expect what he did not promise.

How we prepare our food, how we consume our food really makes a difference in how our food satisfies us and shapes the role we give food in our lives. Is it something we stuff in to satisfy an urge or something we savor to feed us physically and sustain us spiritually?

It is never too soon to prepare for the rest of our lives. The truth is that everyone, regardless of age, is already setting patterns for the shape of his or her life. These patterns of thought and practice will either serve the glory and purposes of God or hinder them.

we don't love people and animals because we will have them forever; we love them because loving them changes us, makes us better, healthier, kinder, realer. Loving people and animals makes us stronger in the right ways and weaker in the right ways. Even if animals and people leave, even if they die, they leave us better. So we keep loving, even though we might lose, because loving teaches us and changes us. And that's what we're here to do. God sends us here to learn how to be better lovers, and to learn how to be loved, so we'll be prepared for heaven.

The season of the world before us will be like no other in the history of mankind. Satan has unleashed every evil, every scheme, every blatant, vile perversion ever known to man in any generation. Just as this is the dispensation of the fullness of times, so it is also the dispensation of the fullness of evil. We and our wives and husbands, our children, and our members must find safety. There is no safety in the world: wealth cannot provide it, enforcement agencies cannot assure it, membership in this Church alone cannot bring it. As the evil night darkens upon this generation, we must come to the temple for light and safety. In our temples we find quiet, sacred havens where the storm cannot penetrate to us. There are hosts of unseen sentinels watching over and guarding our temples. Angels attend every door. As it was in the days of Elisha, so it will be for us: “Those that be with us are more than they that be against us.” Before the Savior comes the world will darken. There will come a period of time where even the elect will lose hope if they do not come to the temples. The world will be so filled with evil that the righteous will only feel secure within these walls. The saints will come here not only to do vicarious work, but to find a haven of peace. They will long to bring their children here for safety’s sake. I believe we may well have living on the earth now or very soon the boy or babe who will be the prophet of the Church when the Savior comes. Those who will sit in the Quorum of Twelve Apostles are here. There are many in our homes and communities who will have apostolic callings. We must keep them clean, sweet and pure in an oh so wicked world. There will be greater hosts of unseen beings in the temple. Prophets of old as well as those in this dispensation will visit the temples. Those who attend will feel their strength and feel their companionship. We will not be alone in our temples. Our garments worn as instructed will clothe us in a manner as protective as temple walls. The covenants and ordinances will fill us with faith as a living fire. In a day of desolating sickness, scorched earth, barren wastes, sickening plagues, disease, destruction, and death, we as a people will rest in the shade of trees, we will drink from the cooling fountains. We will abide in places of refuge from the storm, we will mount up as on eagle’s wings, we will be lifted out of an insane and evil world. We will be as fair as the sun and clear as the moon. The Savior will come and will honor his people. Those who are spared and prepared will be a temple-loving people. They will know Him. They will cry out, “Blessed be the name of He that cometh in the name of the Lord; thou are my God and I will bless thee; thou are my God and I will exalt thee.” Our children will bow down at His feet and worship Him as the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings. They will bathe His feet with their tears and He will weep and bless them for having suffered through the greatest trials ever known to man. His bowels will be filled with compassion and His heart will swell wide as eternity and He will love them. He will bring peace that will last a thousand years and they will receive their reward to dwell with Him. Let us prepare them with faith to surmount every trial and every condition. We will do it in these holy, sacred temples. Come, come, oh come up to the temples of the Lord and abide in His presence.

God put you on earth with a divine assignment- something prepared in advance for you to do. I've found that the things that make us sad, the things that make us righteously angry, or the things we care about that others don't are often a key that unlocks our reason for living. It's our burden.

EPILOGUE This course is a beginning, not an end. Your Friend goes with you. You are not alone. No one who calls on Him can call in vain. Whatever troubles you, be certain that He has the answer, and will gladly give it to you, if you simply turn to Him and ask it of Him. He will not withhold all answers that you need for anything that seems to trouble you. He knows the way to solve all problems, and resolve all doubts. His certainty is yours. You need but ask it of Him, and it will be given you. You are as certain of arriving home as is the pathway of the sun laid down before it rises, after it has set, and in the half-lit hours in between. Indeed, your pathway is more certain still. For it can not be possible to change the course of those whom God has called to Him. Therefore obey your will, and follow Him Whom you accepted as your voice, to speak of what you really want and really need. His is the Voice for God and also yours. And thus He speaks of freedom and of truth. No more specific lessons are assigned, for there is no more need of them. Henceforth, hear but the Voice for God and for your Self when you retire from the world, to seek reality instead. He will direct your efforts, telling you exactly what to do, how to direct your mind, and when to come to Him in silence, asking for His sure direction and His certain Word. His is the Word that God has given you. His is the Word you chose to be your own. And now I place you in His hands, to be His faithful follower, with Him as Guide through every difficulty and all pain that you may think is real. Nor will He give you pleasures that will pass away, for He gives only the eternal and the good. Let Him prepare you further. He has earned your trust by speaking daily to you of your Father and your brother and your Self. He will continue. Now you walk with Him, as certain as is He of where you go; as sure as He of how you should proceed; as confident as He is of the goal, and of your safe arrival in the end. The end is certain, and the means as well. To this we say “Amen.” You will be told exactly what God wills for you each time there is a choice to make. And He will speak for God and for your Self, thus making sure that hell will claim you not, and that each choice you make brings Heaven nearer to your reach. And so we walk with Him from this time on, and turn to Him for guidance and for peace and sure direction. Joy attends our way. For we go homeward to an open door which God has held unclosed to welcome us. We trust our ways to Him and say “Amen.” In peace we will continue in His way, and trust all things to Him. In confidence we wait His answers, as we ask His Will in everything we do. He loves God’s Son as we would love him. And He teaches us how to behold him through His eyes, and love him as He does. You do not walk alone. God’s angels hover near and all about. His Love surrounds you, and of this be sure; that I will never leave you comfortless.

Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by easy electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone. However, only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of “progress,” in a straight line. We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection. “Know yourself,” said the Greeks, gently suggesting the consolations of philosophy. To clear the mind for this project, it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it.

BEAUTIFUL CERTAINTY: I often need to be reminded that God’s timetable is better than mine. The in-between, the meantime, the waiting—it can all be frustrating, but it is in those moments we are refined, redesigned, and realigned with God’s will as He prepares us to be launched into our next chapter.

...the liturgical traditions of the Church, all its cycles and services, exist, first of all, in order to help us recover the vision and the taste of that new life which we so easily lose and betray, so that we may repent and return to it. ... It is through her liturgical life that the Church reveals to us something of that which "the ear has not heard, the eye has not seen, and what has not yet entered the heart of man, but which God has prepared for those who love Him." And in the center of that liturgical life, as its heart and climax, as the sun whose rays penetrate everywhere, stands Pascha.

Let Fate find us prepared and active. Here is the great soul—the one who surrenders to Fate. The opposite is the weak and degenerate one, who struggles with and has a poor regard for the order of the world, and seeks to correct the faults of the gods rather than their own.” —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 107.12

God never gives, nor did He ever give a gift, merely that man might have it and be content with it. No, all gifts which He ever gave in heaven or on earth, He gave with one sole purpose - to make one single gift: Himself. With all His gifts He desires only to prepare us for the one gift, which is Himself.

Out of hope for eternal life, love for this vulnerable and mortal life is born afresh. This love does not give anything up. If we had to surrender hope for as much as one single creature, for us Christ would not have risen. The love founded on hope is the strongest medicine against the spreading sickness of resignation. The modern cynicism which is prepared to accept the death of so many created things is an ally of death. But we Christians are what Christoph Blumhardt called `protest-people against death'. That is why out of the deadly depths we cry out for God's Spirit. That is why we cry out for the Spirit who sustains the whole creation, and wait for the Spirit of the new creation of all things. Our cry from the depths is a sign of life - a sign of divine life.

On many days, doing what matters most will not be easy. It is not supposed to be. God’s purpose in creation was to let us prove ourselves. The plan was explained to us in the spirit world before we were born. We were valiant enough there to qualify for the opportunity to choose against temptation here to prepare for eternal life, the greatest of all the gifts of God. We rejoiced to know the test would be one of faithful obedience even when it would not be easy.

[Christians] must become, must be known as, the people who don't hold grudges, who don't sulk. We must be the people who know how to say "Sorry," and who know how to respond when other people say it to us. It is remarkable, once more, how difficult this still seems, considering how much time the Christian church has had to think about it and how much energy has been spent on expounding the New Testament, where the advice is all so clear. Perhaps it's because we have tried, if at all, to do it as though it were just a matter of obeying an artificial command--and then, finding it difficult, have stopped trying because nobody else seems to be very good at it either. Perhaps it might be different if we reminded ourselves frequently that we are preparing for life in God's new world, and that the death and resurrection of Jesus, which by baptism constitute our own new identity, offer us both the motivation and the energy to try again in a new way.

I know better than to not trust God. But sometimes, I forget that. When we are in the midst of an experience, it is easy to forget that there is a Plan. Sometimes, all we can see is today. If we were to watch only two minutes of the middle of a television program, it would make little sense. It would be a disconnected event. If we were to watch a weaver sewing a tapestry for only a few moments, and focused on only a small piece of the work, it would not look beautiful. It would look like a few peculiar threads randomly placed. How often we use that same, limited perspective to look at our life—especially when we are going through a difficult time. We can learn to have perspective when we are going through those confusing, difficult learning times. When we are being pelleted by events that make us feel, think, and question, we are in the midst of learning something important. We can trust that something valuable is being worked out in us—even when things are difficult, even when we cannot get our bearings. Insight and clarity do not come until we have mastered our lesson. Faith is like a muscle. It must be exercised to grow strong. Repeated experiences of having to trust what we can’t see and repeated experiences of learning to trust that things will work out are what make our faith muscles grow strong. Today, I will trust that the events in my life are not random. My experiences are not a mistake. The Universe, my Higher Power, and life are not picking on me. I am going through what I need to go through to learn something valuable, something that will prepare me for the joy and love I am seeking.

The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual post-immigrant struggle for success turning pathological in, of all places, the gentleman farmer's castle of our superordinary Swede (a character). A guy stacked like a deck of cards for things to unfold entirely differently. In no way prepared for what is going to hit him. How could he, with all his carefully calibrated goodness, have known that the stakes of living obediently were so high? Obedience is embraced to lower the stakes. A beautiful wife. A beautiful house. Runs his business like a charm... This is how successful people live. They're good citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling down on them. There are problems, they adjust. And then everything changes and it becomes impossible. Nothing is smiling down on anybody. And who can adjust then? Here is someone not set up for life's working out poorly, let alone for the impossible. ... the tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy -- that is every man's tragedy.

True, his love for me is not based on my qualification or my preparation. But it is misleading to say that God accepts us the way we are. Rather he accepts us despite the way we are. He receives us only in Christ and for Christ’s sake. Nor does he mean to leave us the way he found us, but to transform us into the likeness of his Son.

PRAYER IS AN EGG On Resurrection Day God will say, "What did you do with the strength and energy your food gave you on earth? How did you use your eyes? What did you make with your five senses while they were dimming and playing out? I gave you hands and feet as tools for preparing the ground for planting. Did you, in the health I gave, do the plowing?" You will not be able to stand when you hear those questions. You will bend double, and finally acknowledge the glory. God will say, "Lift your head and answer the questions." Your head will rise a little, then slump again. "Look at me! Tell what you've done." You try, but you fall back flat as a snake. "I want every detail. Say!" Eventually you will be able to get to a sitting position. "Be plain and clear. I have given you such gifts. What did you do with them?" You turn to the right looking to the prophet for help, as though to say, I am stuck in the mud of my life. Help me out of this! They will answer, those kings, "The time for helping is past. The plow stands there in the field. You should have used it. "Then you turn to the left, where your family is, and they will say, "Don't look at us! This conversation is between you and your creator." Then you pray the prayer that is the essence of every ritual: God, I have no hope. I am torn to shreds. You are my first and last and only refuge. Don't do daily prayers like a bird pecking, moving its head up and down. Prayer is an egg. Hatch out the total helplessness inside.

We commented to her about the practicalness of everything she recalled, how her memories seemed to throw a spotlight on problems and decisions we faced here and now. “But,” she said, “this is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.

This brings us to a further aspect of the doctrine of Tikkun, which is also the most important for the system of practical theosophy. The process in which God conceives, brings forth and develops himself does not reach its final conclusion in God. Certain parts of the process of restitution are allotted to man. Not all the lights which are held in captivity by the powers of darkness are set free by their own efforts; it is man who adds the final touch to the divine countenance; it is he who completes the enthronement of God, the king and the mystical Creator of all things, in His own Kingdom of Heaven; it is he who perfects the maker of all things! In certain spheres of being, divine and human existence are intertwined. The intrinsic, extramundane process of Tikkun, symbolically described as the birth of God's personality, corresponds to the process of mundane history. The historical process and its innermost soul, the religious act of the Jew, prepare the way for the final restitution of all scattered and exiled lights and sparks.

Don’t see your struggle as an interruption to life but as preparation for life. No one said the road would be easy or painless. But God will use this mess for something good. “This trouble you’re in isn’t punishment; it’s training, the normal experience of children . . . God is doing what is best for us, training us to live God’s holy best” (Heb. 12:8, 10 MSG).

We should note that mortification prepares for mental prayer, and the latter, in its turn, facilitates mortification. Therefore, prayer and mortification influence one another. Mortification and patience prepare for prayer through the purification and detachment they produce in us. They enable the person to take flight toward God, and this flight is prayer itself.

There is no house of life out of reach of the stream. So, to be surprised when the rain descends and the foods come, and the winds blow and beat upon the house, as though some strange thing happened unto us, is unreasonable and unjust; it so miscalls our good Master, who never told us to build for fair weather or even to be careful to build out of reach of floods. "We must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God" is not a fair-weather word. "My son, if thou comest to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation." "Ye will not get leave to steal quietly to heaven, in Christ's company, without a conflict and a cross." Even so, even though we must walk in the land of fear, there is no need to fear. The power of His resurrection comes before the fellowship of His sufferings.

Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead. We are still living in the age of the Kantian man, or Kantian man-god. Kant's conclusive exposure of the so-called proofs of the existence of God, his analysis of the limitations of speculative reason, together with his eloquent portrayal of the dgnity of rational man, has had results which might possibly dismay him. How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundelgung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. Stripped of the exiguous metaphysical background which Kant was prepared to allow him, this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d'etre of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek. He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal; and since he is not a Hegelian (Kant, not Hegel, has provided Western ethics with its dominating image) his alienation is without cure. He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age requires and admires, courage. It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it. In fact Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.

Can we give up all for the love of God? When the surrender of ourselves seems too much to ask, it is first of all because our thoughts about God Himself are paltry. We have not really seen Him, we have hardly tested Him at all and learned how good He is. In our blindness we approach Him with suspicious reserve. We ask how much of our fun He intends to spoil, how much He will demand from us, how high is the price we must pay before He is placated. If we had the least notion of His loving-kindness and tender mercy, His fatherly care for His poor children, His generosity, His beautiful plans for us; if we knew how patiently He waits for our turning to Him, how gently He means to lead us to green pastures and still waters, how carefully He is preparing a place for us, how ceaselessly He is ordering and ordaining and engineering His Master Plan for our good-if we had any inkling of all this, could we be reluctant to let go of our smashed dandelions or whatever we clutch so fiercely in our sweaty little hands? If with courage and joy we pour ourselves out for Him and for others for His sake, it is not possible to lose, in any final sense, anything worth keeping. We will lose ourselves and our selfishness. We will gain everything worth having.

This present universe is only one element in the kingdom of God. But it is a very wonderful and important one. And within it the Logos, the now risen Son of man, is currently preparing for us to join him (John 14:2–4). We will see him in the stunning surroundings that he had with the Father before the beginning of the created cosmos (17:24). And we will actively participate in the future governance of the universe. We will not sit around looking at one another or at God for eternity but will join the eternal Logos, “reign with him,” in the endlessly ongoing creative work of God. It is for this that we were each individually intended, as both kings and priests (Exod. 19:6; Rev. 5:10). Thus, our faithfulness over a “few things” in the present phase of our life develops the kind of character that can be entrusted with “many things.” We are, accordingly, permitted to “enter into the joy of our Lord” (Matt. 25:21). That “joy” is, of course, the creation and care of what is good, in all its dimensions. A place in God’s creative order has been reserved for each one of us from before the beginnings of cosmic existence. His plan is for us to develop, as apprentices to Jesus, to the point where we can take our place in the ongoing creativity of the universe.

Our role is not our reward, Jesus is. Roles will begin and they will end. The only way for us to end well is to have our hearts recalibrated. Jesus must increase and we must decrease. What rises in your heart at the thought of Jesus giving another person a more prominent role in his Wedding? How much do you long to have a more prominent role? How well are you prepared to let go of the role he has given you? What if he gives another your role? In our individual and temporary earthly roles, the Wedding is not about us. It’s about Jesus and his bride. And we should never compete with the Bridegroom for the bride’s attention and affection.

The human mind is a lucky little local, passing accident which was totally unforeseen, and condemned to disappear with this earth and to recommence perhaps here or elsewhere the same or different with fresh combinations of eternally new beginnings. We owe it to this little lapse of intelligence on His part that we are very uncomfortable in this world which was not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive us, to lodge and feed us or to satisfy reflecting beings, and we owe it to Him also that we have to struggle without ceasing against what are still called the designs of Providence, when we are really refined and civilized beings.

FALK. I feel myself like God's lost prodigal; I left Him for the world's delusive charms. With mild reproof He wooed me to His arms; And when I come, He lights the vaulted hall, Prepares a banquet for the son restored, And makes His noblest creature my reward. From this time forth I'll never leave that Light,— But stand its armed defender in the fight; Nothing shall part us, and our life shall prove A song of glory to triumphant love!

With the best of intentions, the generation before mine worked diligently to prepare their children to make an intelligent case for Christianity. We were constantly reminded of the superiority of our own worldview and the shortcomings of all others. We learned that as Christians, we alone had access to absolute truth and could win any argument. The appropriate Bible verses were picked out for us, the opposing positions summarized for us, and the best responses articulated for us, so that we wouldn’t have to struggle through two thousand years of theological deliberations and debates but could get right to the bottom line on the important stuff: the deity of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, the role and interpretation of Scripture, and the fundamentals of Christianity. As a result, many of us entered the world with both an unparalleled level of conviction and a crippling lack of curiosity. So ready with the answers, we didn’t know what the questions were anymore. So prepared to defend the faith, we missed the thrill of discovering it for ourselves. So convinced we had God right, it never occurred to us that we might be wrong. In short, we never learned to doubt. Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue. Where would we be if the apostle Peter had not doubted the necessity of food laws, or if Martin Luther had not doubted the notion that salvation can be purchased? What if Galileo had simply accepted church-instituted cosmology paradigms, or William Wilberforce the condition of slavery? We do an injustice to the intricacies and shadings of Christian history when we gloss over the struggles, when we read Paul’s epistles or Saint Augustine’s Confessions without acknowledging the difficult questions that these believers asked and the agony with which they often asked them. If I’ve learned anything over the past five years, it’s that doubt is the mechanism by which faith evolves. It helps us cast off false fundamentals so that we can recover what has been lost or embrace what is new. It is a refining fire, a hot flame that keeps our faith alive and moving and bubbling about, where certainty would only freeze it on the spot. I would argue that healthy doubt (questioning one’s beliefs) is perhaps the best defense against unhealthy doubt (questioning God). When we know how to make a distinction between our ideas about God and God himself, our faith remains safe when one of those ideas is seriously challenged. When we recognize that our theology is not the moon but rather a finger pointing at the moon, we enjoy the freedom of questioning it from time to time. We can say, as Tennyson said, Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they.15 I sometimes wonder if I might have spent fewer nights in angry, resentful prayer if only I’d known that my little systems — my theology, my presuppositions, my beliefs, even my fundamentals — were but broken lights of a holy, transcendent God. I wish I had known to question them, not him. What my generation is learning the hard way is that faith is not about defending conquered ground but about discovering new territory. Faith isn’t about being right, or settling down, or refusing to change. Faith is a journey, and every generation contributes its own sketches to the map. I’ve got miles and miles to go on this journey, but I think I can see Jesus up ahead.

It does not even seem to enter our minds that there might be some incongruity in praying to the God of peace, the God Who told us to love one another as He had loved us, Who warned us that they who took the sword would perish by it, and at the same time planning to annihilate not thousands but millions of civilians and soldiers, men, women and children without discrimination, even with the almost infallible certainty of inviting the same annihilation for ourselves! It may make sense for a sick man to pray for health and then take medicine, but I fail to see any sense at all in his praying for health and then drinking poison. WHEN I pray for peace I pray God to pacify not only the Russians and the Chinese but above all my own nation and myself. When I pray for peace I pray to be protected not only from the Reds but also from the folly and blindness of my own country. When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my country may cease to want war, but above all that my own country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable. In other words, when I pray for peace I am not just praying that the Russians will give up without a struggle and let us have our own way. I am praying that both we and the Russians may somehow be restored to sanity and learn how to work out our problems, as best we can, together, instead of preparing for global suicide.

Ah! How little I then thought that my eyes looked on him who was to be my life’s beloved; how little I dreamed of the honour God was preparing for me in the near future! It is a mercy that our lives are not left for us to plan, but that our Father chooses for us; else we might sometimes turn away from our best blessings and put from us the choicest and loveliest gifts of His providence. (quoted in Susie: The Life and Legacy of Susannah Spurgeon by Ray Rhodes, Jr.)

The doors burst open, startling me awake. I nearly jumped out of bed. Tove groaned next to me, since I did this weird mind-slap thing whenever I woke up scared, and it always hit him the worst. I'd forgotten about it because it had been a few months since the last time it happened. "Good morning, good morning, good morning," Loki chirped, wheeling in a table covered with silver domes. "What are you doing?" I asked, squinting at him. He'd pulled up the shades. I was tired as hell, and I was not happy. "I thought you two lovebirds would like breakfast," Loki said. "So I had the chef whip you up something fantastic." As he set up the table in the sitting area, he looked over at us. "Although you two are sleeping awfully far apart for newlyweds." "Oh, my god." I groaned and pulled the covers over my head. "You know, I think you're being a dick," Tove told him as he got out of bed. "But I'm starving. So I'm willing to overlook it. This time." "A dick?" Loki pretended to be offended. "I'm merely worried about your health. If your bodies aren't used to strenuous activities, like a long night of lovemaking, you could waste away if you don't get plenty of protein and rehydrate. I'm concerned for you." "Yes, we both believe that's why you're here," Tove said sarcastically and took a glass of orange juice that Loki had poured for him. "What about you, Princess?" Loki's gaze cut to me as he filled another glass. "I'm not hungry." I sighed and sat up. "Oh, really?" Loki arched an eyebrow. "Does that mean that last night-" "It means that last night is none of your business," I snapped. I got up and hobbled over to Elora's satin robe, which had been left on a nearby chair. My feet and ankles ached from all the dancing I'd done the night before. "Don't cover up on my account," Loki said as I put on the robe. "You don't have anything I haven't seen." "Oh, I have plenty you haven't seen," I said and pulled the robe around me. "You should get married more often," Loki teased. "It makes you feisty." I rolled my eyes and went over to the table. Loki had set it all up, complete with a flower in a vase in the center, and he'd pulled off the domed lids to reveal a plentiful breakfast. I took a seat across from Tove, only to realize that Loki had pulled up a third chair for himself. "What are you doing?" I asked. "Well, I went to all the trouble of having someone prepare it, so I might as well eat it." Loki sat down and handed me a flute filled with orange liquid. "I made mimosas." "Thanks," I said, and I exchanged a look with Tove to see if it was okay if Loki stayed. "He's a dick," Tove said over a mouthful of food, and shrugged. "But I don't care." In all honesty, I think we both preferred having Loki there. He was a buffer between the two of us so we didn't have to deal with any awkward morning-after conversations. And though I'd never admit it aloud, Loki made me laugh, and right now I needed a little levity in my life. "So, how did everyone sleep last night?" Loki asked. There was a quick knock at the bedroom doors, but they opened before I could answer. Finn strode inside, and my stomach dropped. He was the last person I'd expected to see. I didn't even think he would be here anymore. After the other night I assumed he'd left, especially when I didn't see him at the wedding. "Princess, I'm sorry-" Finn started to say as he hurried in, but then he saw Loki and stopped abruptly. "Finn?" I asked, stunned. Finn looked appalled and pointed at Loki. "What are you doing here?" "I'm drinking a mimosa." Loki leaned back in his chair. "What are you doing here?" "What is he doing here?" Finn asked, turning his attention to me. "Never mind him." I waved it off. "What's going on?" "See, Finn, you should've told me when I asked," Loki said between sips of his drink.

Philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a God can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poeticizing, for the appearance of the God or for the absence of the God in the time of foundering for in the face of the God who is absent, we founder. Only a God can save us.

When a loving person dies, God sends angels to escort them on their journey to heaven. Angels are the messengers of God. They could be relatives or friends, but they will be exactly the right persons who represent God’s love to the individual. The persons you long for, who have gone to heaven before you, will be waiting for you when you die. They will be ready to comfort you and escort you to heaven. They will take you from the reality of this physical universe and transport you to a new reality where you get your first introduction to the wonder and power of God. There are as many entry points into heaven as there are individuals. Each person is escorted toward heaven according to his or her life, culture, and spiritual level. One person may be in a beautiful field, another may be in a magnificent castle, another in a setting similar to their grandparents’ home. God and the angels, for the specific comfort and beginning edification of that person, individually create each setting. It is difficult for us to understand and believe how much God cares about and respects our individuality. The angel guardians begin the process of explaining to the person that they have left the world and are beginning life. Everything behind was preparation for real life. What we call death is actually being born into a new life beyond our imagination. We will grow and be transformed. We will meet the personification of God, and eventually we will come before the very presence of God.

Someone once elaborated on each line of the well-known and much-loved Psalm 23: The Lord is my Shepherd — that’s relationship! I shall not be in want — that’s supply! He makes me lie down in green pastures — that’s rest! He leads me beside quiet waters — that’s refreshment! He restores my soul — that’s healing! He guides me in the paths of righteousness — that’s guidance! For His name’s sake — that’s purpose! Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death —that’s testing! I will fear no evil — that’s protection! For you are with me — that’s faithfulness! Your rod and the staff, they comfort me — that’s discipline! You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies —that’s hope! You anoint my head with oil — that’s consecration! My cup overflows — that’s abundance! Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life —that’s blessing! And I will dwell in the house of the Lord — that’s security! Forever — that’s eternity! AUTHOR OF ELABORATED MATERIAL UNKNOWN

The devil is a wicked and angry spirit. He will not and cannot stand seeing a man enter the kingdom of God. And if the man undertakes to do so, he blocks the way himself, arousing and attempting every kind of opposition he can summon. If you want to be God's child, therefore, prepare yourself for persecution, as the wise man says. Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:12, 'All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.' And Christ Himself says (John 15:20): 'The disciple should not be better off than his master. If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you.' There is no way out, and therefore the statement is: 'Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of the kingdom of heaven,' to let us know how to console ourselves.

It is simple. Men lose their birthrights for a mess of pottage only if they stop using the gifts given them by God for their betterment. By prayer. That is the first and greatest gift. use the gift of prayer. Ask for strength of mind, and a clear vision. Then sense. Use your sense. Not all of us are born for greatness, but all of us have sense. Make use of it. Think. Think long and well. By prayer and good thought you will conquer all enemies....Behold, the night is coming. Prepare, for the time is at hand.

Ritual abuse is highly organised and, obviously, secretive. It is often linked with other major crimes such as child pornography, child prostitution, the drugs industry, trafficking, and many other illegal and heinous activities. Ritual abuse is organised sexual, physical and psychological abuse, which can be systematic and sustained over a long period of time. It involves the use of rituals - things which the abusers 'need' to do, or 'need' to have in place - but it doesn't have to have a belief system. There doesn't have to be God or the Devil, or any other deity for it to be considered 'ritual'. It involves using patterns of learning and development to keep the abuse going and to make sure the child stays quiet. There has been, and still is a great deal of debate about whether or not such abuse exists anywhere in the world. There are many people who constantly deny that there is even such a thing as ritual abuse. All I can say is that I know there is. Not only have I been a victim of it myself, but I have been dealing with survivors of this type of abuse for almost 30 years. If there are survivors, there must be something that they have survived. The things is, most sexual abuse of children is ritualised in some way. Abusers use repetition, routine and ritual to forced children into the patterns of behaviour they require. Some abusers want their victims to wear certain clothing, to say certain things. They might bathe them or cut them, they might burn them or abuse them only on certain days of the week. They might do a hundred other things which are ritualistic, but aren't always called that - partly, I think because we have a terror of the word and of accepting just how premeditated abuse actually is. Abusers instill fear in their victims and ensure silence; they do all they can to avoid being caught. Sexual abuse of a child is rarely a random act. It involves thorough planning and preparation beforehand. They threaten the children with death, with being taken into care, with no one believing them, which physical violence or their favourite teddy being taken away. They are told that their mum will die, or their dad will hate them, the abusers say everyone will think it's their fault, that everyone already knows they are bad. Nothing is too big or small for an abuser to use as leverage. There is unmistakable proof that abusers do get together in order to share children, abuse more children, and even learn from each other. As more cases have come into the public eye in recent years, this has become increasingly obvious. More and more of this type of abuse is coming to light. I definitely think it is the word ritual which causes people to question, to feel uncomfortable, or even just disbelieve. It seems almost incredible that such things would happen, but too many of us know exactly how bad the lives of many children are. A great deal of child pornography shows children being abused in a ritualised setting, and many have now come forward to share their experiences, but there is a still tendency to say it just couldn't happen. p204-205

Jesus was not just a moralist whose teachings had some political implications; he was not primarily a teacher of spirituality whose public ministry unfortunately was seen in a political light; he was not just a sacrificial lamb preparing for his immolation, or a God-Man whose divine status calls us to disregard his humanity. Jesus was, in his divinely mandated (i.e., promised, anointed, messianic) prophethood, priesthood, and kingship, the bearer of a new possibility of human, social, and therefore political relationships.

the gospel is good news for losers, that in fact we are all losers if we measure ourselves by God’s interpretation of reality rather than our own. The demand for glory, power, comfort, autonomy, health, and wealth creates a vicious cycle of craving and disillusionment. It even creates its own industry of therapists and exercise, style, and self-esteem gurus—and churches—to massage the egos wounded by this hedonism. When crisis hits, the soul is too effete to respond appropriately. We become prisoners of our own felt needs, which were inculcated in us in the first place by the very marketplace that promises a “fix.” We become victims of our own shallow hopes. We are too easily disappointed because we are too easily persuaded that the marketplace always has something that can make us happy.

If you commit to philosophy, be prepared at once to be laughed at and made the butt of many snide remarks, like, ‘Suddenly there’s a philosopher among us!’ and ‘What makes him so pretentious now?’ Only don’t be pretentious: just stick to your principles as if God had made you accept the role of philosopher. And rest assured that, if you remain true to them, the same people who made fun of you will come to admire you in time; whereas, if you let these people dissuade you from your choice, you will earn their derision twice over.

Spiritual reading, discursive meditation, and prayer prepare our hearts for contemplation. Contemplation is a state of realized oneness with God. When engaged in contemplation, we rest in God resting in us. We are at home in God at home in us. Our role in contemplation is essentially receptive, in that when we are engaged in contemplation we receive a gift of divine awareness. Contemplation, in its essentially receptive aspect, is sometimes referred to as mystical experience or mystical prayer. The word mystical, as used in the classical Christian texts, does not refer to having visions, hearing God’s voice, or experiencing any other similar, extraordinary events. Although these kinds of experiences can and do occur, they do not necessarily arise from God, and even when they do, they can become hindrances if we cling to them. The Christian mystics use the terms contemplation and mystical union with God to refer not to visions and other similar experiences, but rather to a life-transforming realization of oneness with God. In this mystical realization of oneness with God we are liberated from our tendencies to derive our security and identity from anything less than God. In specifically Christian terms, we enter the mind of Christ, who realized oneness with God to be the reality of himself and of everyone and everything around him.

He closed the book and said, “We believe too often that on the roads we walk we walk alone. Which is never true. Even this man who is unknown to us was known to God and God was his constant companion. God never promised us an easy life. He never promised that we wouldn’t suffer, that we wouldn’t feel despair and loneliness and confusion and desperation. What he did promise was that in our suffering we would never be alone. And though we may sometimes make ourselves blind and deaf to his presence he is beside us and around us and within us always. We are never separated from his love. And he promised us something else, the most important promise of all. That there would be surcease. That there would be an end to our pain and our suffering and our loneliness, that we would be with him and know him, and this would be heaven. This man, who in life may have felt utterly alone, feels alone no more. This man, whose life may have been days and nights of endless waiting, is waiting no more. He is where God always knew he would be, in a place prepared. And for this we rejoice.

But hell can endure for only a limited period, and life will begin again one day. History may perhaps have an end; but our task is not to terminate it but to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be true. Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most instinctive act of rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy its hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality whose name is beauty. One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars. The rebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned to banish from history everything with which they want to construct the dignity of existence and of labor. Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and Tolstoy knew how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with unity, is also the procedure of rebellion. Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one that lights the way to a truly realistic revolution. In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place—far ahead of the formal principles and degraded values of history—to this living virtue on which is founded the common dignity of man and the world he lives in, and which we must now define in the face of a world that insults it.

Spiritual formation prepares us for a life in which we move away from our fears, compulsions, resentments, and sorrows, to serve with joy and courage in the world, even when this leads us to places we would rather not go. Spiritual formation helps us to see the face of God in the midst of a hardened world and in our own heart. This freedom helps us to use our skills and our very lives to make that face visible to all who live in bondage and fear. As Jesus told his disciples: “So, if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

At the heart of God is the desire to give and to forgive. Because of this, he set into motion the entire redemptive process that culminated in the cross and was confirmed in the resurrection. The usual notion of what Jesus did on the cross was something like this: people were so bad and so mean and God was so angry with them that he could not forgive them unless somebody big enough took the rap for the whole lot of them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God’s great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it. This is why Jesus refused the customary painkiller when it was offered him. He wanted to be completely alert for this greatest work of redemption. In a deep and mysterious way he was preparing to take on the collective sin of the human race. Since Jesus lives in the eternal now, this work was not just for those around him, but he took in all the violence, all the fear, all the sin of all the past, all the present, and all the future. This was his highest and most holy work, the work that makes confession and the forgiveness of sins possible…Some seem to think that when Jesus shouted “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” it was a moment of weakness (Mark 15:34). Not at all. This was his moment of greatest triumph. Jesus, who had walked in constant communion with the Father, now became so totally identified with humankind that he was the actual embodiment of sin. As Paul writes, “he made him to be sin who knew no sin (2 Cor. 5:21). Jesus succeeded in taking into himself all of the dark powers of this present evil age and defeated every one of them by the light of his presence. He accomplished such a total identification with the sin of the race that he experienced the abandonment of God. Only in that way could he redeem sin. It was indeed his moment of greatest triumph. Having accomplished this greatest of all his works, Jesus then took refreshment. “It is finished,” he announced. That is, this great work of redemption was completed. He could feel the last dregs of the misery of humankind flow through him and into the care of the Father. The last twinges of evil, hostility, anger, and fear drained out of him, and he was able to turn again into the light of God’s presence. “It is finished.” The task is complete. Soon after, he was free to give up his spirit to the father. …Without the cross the Discipline of confession would be only psychologically therapeutic. But it is so much more. It involves and objective change in our relationship with God and a subjective change in us. It is a means of healing and transforming the inner spirit.

You spoke of the saints a moment ago. You spoke of them as though they were men and women of exceptional, inhuman holiness, so far above us mere mortal men that they could only be revered from afar. Never could they be looked to as examples—never role models for us to emulate. I understand your feelings. It pains me to admit that we, the church, have too often failed you by perpetuating this inaccurate image of the saints. In truth, they are very much human, very much like you and me. They lived in the world with the same fears, temptations, and failings that everyone must. So you see, what made them saints was not the absence of fear or failure, but instead their willing surrender to the grace of God, a grace available to all who come to the Cross. Yes, that does mean suffering and perhaps death, but for Jesus Christ they were prepared to suffer still more.

The greatest blessings require that we immerse ourselves in our Father's words. To have the scriptures nearby and yet turn to other resources for solace and power is an enormous loss. For those who know better, it is a foolish error. "How could a person possibly become what his is not thinking?" asked Spencer W. Kimball. It's amazing what happens within us when we turn on the inside lights. To regularly immerse our minds in the thoughts of God himself is to make a wise investment in our personal growth. Scripture study prepares us for personal inspiration by training the heart.

First of all I will confess quite simply—I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions, and that we need only to ask repeatedly and a little humbly, in order to receive this answer. One cannot simply read the Bible, like other books. One must be prepared really to enquire of it. Only thus will it reveal itself. Only if we expect from it the ultimate answer, shall we receive it. That is because in the Bible God speaks to us. And one cannot simply think about God in one’s own strength, one has to enquire of him. Only if we seek him, will he answer us. Of course it is also possible to read the Bible like any other book, that is to say from the point of view of textual criticism, etc.; there is nothing to be said against that. Only that that is not the method which will reveal to us the heart of the Bible, but only the surface, just as we do not grasp the words of someone we love by taking them to bits, but by simply receiving them, so that for days they go on lingering in our minds, simply because they are the words of a person we love; and just as these words reveal more and more of the person who said them as we go on, like Mary, “pondering them in our heart,” so it will be with the words of the Bible. Only if we will venture to enter into the words of the Bible, as though in them this God were speaking to us who loves us and does not will to leave us along with our questions, only so shall we learn to rejoice in the Bible. . . .

When we choose to follow the way of Jesus, we will sometimes find ourselves in situations where we have to choose between silence and integrity. Our silence may keep the peace and protect us from the consequences of offending those in power over us, but we will lose part of ourselves. Standing against injustice and the abuse of power demands courage. It will often cost us dearly, but it will also demonstrate our integrity and our commitment to God’s alternative way of living. If we answer God’s call to participate in God’s plan, we will have to prepare ourselves for these conflicts and learn to experience God’s life and grace in the midst of them.

WHAT about the men who run about the countryside painting signs that say “Jesus saves” and “Prepare to meet God!” Have you ever seen one of them? I have not, but I often try to imagine them, and I wonder what goes on in their minds. Strangely, their signs do not make me think of Jesus, but of them. Or perhaps it is “their Jesus” who gets in the way and makes all thought of Jesus impossible. They wish to force their Jesus upon us, and He is perhaps only a projection of themselves. They seem to be at times threatening the world with judgment and at other times promising it mercy. But are they asking simply to be loved and recognized and valued, for themselves?

Have you ever felt a stirring in your heart as a touching story brought tears to your eyes or as you heard a soaring symphony or a captivating song on the radio that opened a new window in your soul? Maybe you have felt a similar exhilaration while watching a sunset, camping out under the night sky, or holding a newborn babe. Something inside of you quickened, and for a moment, some heavenly beauty connected your inner self with the divine. C. S. Lewis referred to such experiences as joy. These are remnants and reminders of the perfect world God designed for us to live in—the shadow of places He longs to take us to, the reality of the other world He’s preparing for us.

Central to knowing the Father is understanding the revealed pattern of family. The family is the most important unit in time and in eternity and is ordained of God. Living in loving family relationships not only brings us great happiness, but it also helps us learn correct principles and prepares us for eternal life. In addition, family relationships help us know, love, and understand the Father. This is one reason Latter-day Saints have always emphasized the importance of marriage and family both in the Church and in society. God’s plan provides a way for family relationships to extend beyond the grave. We can return to the presence of God, eternally united with our families.

In the jungle of modern permissiveness the meaning and purpose of sex is missed, and its glory is lost. Our benighted society urgently needs recalling to the noble and ennobling view of sex that Scripture implies and the seventh commandment assumes: namely, that sex is for fully and permanently committed relationships that, by being the blend of affection, loyalty, and biology that they are, prepare us for and help us into that which is their archetype—“the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united” to God, men, and angels “in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water” (C. S. Lewis).

God often uses failure to make us useful. When Jesus called the disciples, He did not go out and find the most qualified and successful people. He found the most willing, and He found them in the workplace. He found a fisherman, a tax collector, and a farmer. The Hebrews knew that failure was a part of maturing in God. The Greeks used failure as a reason for disqualification. Sadly, in the Church, we often treat one another in this way. This is not God's way. We need to understand that failing does not make us failures. It makes us experienced. It makes us more prepared to be useful in God's Kingdom -- if we have learned from it. And that is the most important ingredient for what God wants in His children.

Accordingly, my new version of what the Bible is about reads as follows: it is about the mystery by which the power of God works to form this world into the Holy City, the New Jerusalem that comes down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. Note, if you will, how much distance that puts between us and certain customary notions of the main subject of Scripture. It means that it is not about someplace else called heaven, nor about somebody at a distance called God. Rather, it is about this place here, in all its thisness and placiness, and about the intimate and immediate Holy One who, at no distance from us at all, moves mysteriously to make creation true both to itself and to him.

The thought of death and life after death is ambivalent. It can deflect us from this life, with its pleasures and pains. It can make life here a transition, a step on the way to another life beyond – and by doing so it can make this life empty and void. It can draw love from this life and deflect it to a life hereafter, spreading resignation in ‘this vale of tears’. The thought of death and a life after death can lead to fatalism and apathy, so that we only live life here half-heartedly, or just endure it and ‘get through’. The thought of a life after death can cheat us of the happiness and the pain of this life, so that we squander its treasures, selling them off cheap to heaven. In that respect it is better to live every day as if death didn’t exist, better to love life here and now as unreservedly as if death really were ‘the finish’. The notion that this life is no more than a preparation for a life beyond, is the theory of a refusal to live, and a religious fraud. It is inconsistent with the living God, who is ‘a lover of life’. In that sense it is religious atheism.

(...) all the major theistic traditions insist at some point that our language about God consists mostly in conceptual restrictions and fruitful negations. 'Cataphatic' (or affirmative) theology must always be chastened and corrected by 'apophatic' (or negative) theology. We cannot speak of God in his own nature directly, but only at best analogously, and even then only in such a way that the conceptual content of our analogies consists largely in our knowledge of all the things that God is not. This is the via negativa of Christianity, the lahoot salbi (negative theology) of Islam, Hinduism’s 'neti, neti' ('not this, not this'). (...) And for the contemplatives of various traditions, the negation of all those limited concepts that delude us that God is just another being among beings, within our intellectual grasp, is an indispensable discipline of the mind and will. It prepares the mind for a knowledge of God that comes not from categories of analytic reason, but from—as Maximus says—the intimate embrace of union, in which God shares himself immediately as a gift to the created soul.

Concerning this desert, Jeremiah writes: ‘I will lead my beloved into the wilderness and will speak to her in her heart’ (Hosea 2:14) . . . The prophet hungered for this desolate self-abandonment when he said: ‘Who will give me the wings of a dove that I may fly away and be at rest?’ (Psalm 55:6). Where do we find peace and rest? Only in abandonment, in the desert and in isolation from all creatures . . . Now you could say . . . if all this must be removed, then it is grievous if God allows us to remain without any support. ‘Woe to me that my exile is prolonged’ (Psalm 120:5), as the prophet says, if God prolongs my dereliction without casting his light upon me, speaking to me or working in me, as you are suggesting here. If we thus enter a state of pure nothingness, is it not better that we should do something in order to drive away the darkness and dereliction? Should we not pray or read or listen to a sermon or do something else that is virtuous in order to help ourselves? No, certainly not! The very best thing you can do is to remain still for as long as possible . . . You cannot think about or desire this preparation more swiftly than God can carry it out . . . You should know that God must pour himself into you and act upon you where he finds you prepared . . . just as the sun must pour itself forth and cannot hold itself back when the air is pure and clean. Certainly, it would be a major failing if God did not perform great works in you, pouring great goodness into you, in so far as he finds you empty and there.

Being Soobie, always honest to himself, he was prepared to be no less than honest to God. – I do not know who made the part of me that thinks. I do not know who I really am or what I really am. I am never satisfied to pretend. I cannot pretend that you are listening to me. I can only give you the benefit of the doubt. And it is a massive doubt, I can tell you. I do not know whether I believe in you, and, what is worse, you might not believe in me. But I need help and there is nowhere else to turn. The flesh-and-blood people who come here have something they called faith. Please, if you are listening to a rag doll with a blue face, let the faith of those others be enough for you to help me. I must find my sister, or my mother will be the first of us to die. Dear God, I don’t even know what that means!

It’s out there, all right,’ the Prior insists. ‘Since God has given me — given us three — this holy mission of serving him in absolute seclusion, he will have prepared a fit place for us.’ ‘Amen,’ Trian murmurs. Cormac’s thinking, it will have to possess a spring or a well, to supply them with water. So, a scrap of land far from the mainland, and well south of all the other islands. Capable of cultivation . . . but where no one is living, nor ever tried living. For the first time, Cormac registers how unlikely that sounds. ‘It will be defended by waves against the world’s encroachings,’ the Prior goes on. ‘All we have to do is wait for a wind, Brothers, and let it take us there.’ This is sounding to Cormac less and less like an actual island. As if the three of them have stepped out of everyday life into a magical boat, and their journey is a fable.

First of all I will confess quite simply—I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions, and that we need only to ask repeatedly and a little humbly, in order to receive this answer. One cannot simply read the Bible, like other books. One must be prepared really to enquire of it. Only thus will it reveal itself. Only if we expect from it the ultimate answer, shall we receive it. That is because in the Bible God speaks to us. And one cannot simply think about God in one’s own strength, one has to enquire of him. Only if we seek him, will he answer us. Of course it is also possible to read the Bible like any other book, that is to say from the point of view of textual criticism, etc.; there is nothing to be said against that. Only that that is not the method which will reveal to us the heart of the Bible, but only the surface, just as we do not grasp the words of someone we love by taking them to bits, but by simply receiving them, so that for days they go on lingering in our minds, simply because they are the words of a person we love; and just as these words reveal more and more of the person who said them as we go on, like Mary, “pondering them in our heart,” so it will be with the words of the Bible. Only if we will venture to enter into the words of the Bible, as though in them this God were speaking to us who loves us and does not will to leave us along with our questions, only so shall we learn to rejoice in the Bible. . . .

But suppose my daughters had approached me as we often approach God. “Hey, Dad, glad you’re home. Here is what I want. More toys. More candy. And can we go to Disneyland this summer?” “Whoa,” I would have wanted to say. “I’m not a waiter, and this isn’t a restaurant. I’m your father, and this is our house. Why don’t you just climb up on Daddy’s lap and let me tell you how much I love you?” Ever thought God might want to do the same with you? Oh, he wouldn’t say that to me. He wouldn’t? Then to whom was he speaking when he said, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3 NIV)? Was he playing games when he said, “Nothing . . . will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ” (Rom. 8:39)? Buried in the seldom-quarried mines of the minor prophets is this jewel: The LORD your God is with you; the mighty One will save you. He will rejoice over you. You will rest in his love; he will sing and be joyful about you. (Zeph. 3:17) Don’t move too quickly through that verse. Read it again and prepare yourself for a surprise. The LORD your God is with you; the mighty One will save you. He will rejoice over you. You will rest in his love; he will sing and be joyful about you. (Zeph. 3:17) Note who is active and who is passive. Who is singing, and who is resting? Who is rejoicing over his loved one, and who is being rejoiced over? We tend to think we are the singers and God is the “singee.” Most certainly that is often the case. But apparently there are times when God wishes we would just be still and (what a stunning thought!) let him sing over us. I can see you squirming. You say you aren’t worthy of such affection? Neither was Judas, but Jesus washed his feet. Neither was Peter, but Jesus fixed him breakfast. Neither were the Emmaus-bound disciples, but Jesus took time to sit at their table. Besides, who are we to determine if we are worthy? Our job is simply to be still long enough to let him have us and let him love us.

This, the universal Christ who, in grace and love, holds all things and all people and all creatures in that grace, is what gives me hope in this world. The universal Christ, who is not a colonizer, who does not seek after profit or create empires to rule over the poor or to oppress people, is constantly asking us to see ourselves as we fit in this sacredly created world. It is what my Potawatomi ancestors saw when they prayed to Kche Mnedo, to Mamogosnan, and is what our relatives still see when they pray today, a sacred belonging that spans time and generations and is called by many names. Today, it is what I continue to see in my own faith—not a Christianity bound by a sinner’s prayer and an everyday existence ruled by gender-divided Bible studies and accountability meetings but a story of faith that’s always bigger, always more inclusive, always making room at a bigger and better table full of lavish food that has already been prepared for everyone and for every created thing.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait. “But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. “And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

SECTION IV: CALIBRATED QUESTIONS Prepare three to five calibrated questions to reveal value to you and your counterpart and identify and overcome potential deal killers. Effective negotiators look past their counterparts’ stated positions (what the party demands) and delve into their underlying motivations (what is making them want what they want). Motivations are what they are worried about and what they hope for, even lust for. Figuring out what the other party is worried about sounds simple, but our basic human expectations about negotiation often get in the way. Most of us tend to assume that the needs of the other side conflict with our own. We tend to limit our field of vision to our issues and problems, and forget that the other side has its own unique issues based on its own unique worldview. Great negotiators get past these blinders by being relentlessly curious about what is really motivating the other side. Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling has a great quote that sums up this concept: “You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it’s whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.” There will be a small group of “What” and “How” questions that you will find yourself using in nearly every situation. Here are a few of them: What are we trying to accomplish? How is that worthwhile? What’s the core issue here? How does that affect things? What’s the biggest challenge you face? How does this fit into what the objective is? QUESTIONS TO IDENTIFY BEHIND-THE-TABLE DEAL KILLERS When implementation happens by committee, the support of that committee is key. You’ll want to tailor your calibrated questions to identify and unearth the motivations of those behind the table, including: How does this affect the rest of your team? How on board are the people not on this call? What do your colleagues see as their main challenges in this area? QUESTIONS TO IDENTIFY AND DIFFUSE DEAL-

Most of us are not prepared to read the Word of God as He deserves. Our training in reading has been typically ordered to anything but reverence. We read in school for tests, developing the art of anticipating the questions of our teachers. We read casually for entertainment and pleasure, as scarce time permits, scanning and skipping around as we freely choose. We read for business, and profit, culling through words for whatever seems of value to us here and now. Words are for us seen as information for our profit, or entertainment or pleasure. Rarely do we have a sense of words as treasure as infinite value, or of food for life of famine, or of clear and clean water in parched, dead-dry desert. Yet the Word of God, in Scripture, is all this and more. His words are a living seed with potentials for full growth that we cannot fully imagine. His words are healing medicine to dying mankind. His words are boundless wealth to the destitute poor, and rejuvenation to those broken by age. His words are all this and more, because they are His words to us, His children whom He loves with a love we can hardly begin to grasp.

Holidays: Imagine if the great holidays and seasons of the Christian year were redesigned to emphasize love. Advent would be the season of preparing our hearts to receive God’s love. Epiphany would train us to keep our eyes open for expressions of compassion in our daily lives. Lent would be an honest self-examination of our maturity in love and a renewal of our commitment to grow in it. Instead of giving up chocolate or coffee for Lent, we would stop criticizing or gossiping about or interrupting others. Maundy Thursday would refocus us on the great and new commandment; Good Friday would present the suffering of crucifixion as the suffering of love; Holy Saturday would allow us to lament and grieve the lack of love in our lives and world; and Easter would celebrate the revolutionary power of death-defying love. Pentecost could be an “altar call” to be filled with the Spirit of love, and “ordinary time” could be “extraordinary time” if it involved challenges to celebrate and express love in new ways—to new people, to ourselves, to the earth, and to God—including time to tell stories about our experiences of doing so.

Let us, in good psychiatric fashion, look at the facts. In the last one hundred years we, in the Western world, have created a greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race. Yet we have managed to kill off millions of our population in an arrangement which we call “war.” Aside from smaller wars, we had larger ones in 1870, 1914 and 1939. During these wars, every participant firmly believed that he was fighting in his self-defense, for his honor, or that he was backed up by God. The groups with whom one is at war are, often from one day to the next, looked upon as cruel, irrational fiends, whom one must defeat to save the world from evil. But a few years after the mutual slaughter is over, the enemies of yesterday are our friends, the friends of yesterday our enemies, and again in full seriousness we begin to paint them with appropriate colors of black and white. At this moment, in the year 1955, we are prepared for a mass slaughter which would, if it came to pass, surpass any slaughter the human race has arranged so far. One of the greatest discoveries in the field of natural science is prepared for this purpose. Everybody is looking with a mixture of confidence and apprehension to the “statesmen” of the various peoples, ready to heap all praise on them if they “succeed in avoiding a war,” and ignoring the fact that it is only these very statesmen who ever cause a war, usually not even through their bad intentions, but by their unreasonable mismanagement of the affairs entrusted to them. In these outbursts of destructiveness and paranoid suspicion, however, we are not behaving differently from what the civilized part of mankind has done in the last three thousand years of history.

Our Difficulty in Believing in Providence The first obstacle is that, as long as we have not experienced concretely the fidelity of Divine Providence to provide for our essential needs, we have difficulty believing in it and we abandon it. We have hard heads, the words of Jesus do not suffice for us, we want to see at least a little in order to believe! Well, we do not see it operating around us in a clear manner. How, then, are we to experience it? It is important to know one thing: We cannot experience this support from God unless we leave Him the necessary space in which He can express Himself. I would like to make a comparison. As long as a person who must jump with a parachute does not jump out into the void, he cannot feel that the cords of the parachute will support him, because the parachute has not yet had the chance to open. One must first jump and it is only later that one feels carried. And so it is in spiritual life: “God gives in the measure that we expect of Him,” says Saint John of the Cross. And Saint Francis de Sales says: “The measure of Divine Providence acting on us is the degree of confidence that we have in it.” This is where the problem lies. Many do not believe in Providence because they’ve never experienced it, but they’ve never experienced it because they’ve never jumped into the void and taken the leap of faith. They never give it the possibility to intervene. They calculate everything, anticipate everything, they seek to resolve everything by counting on themselves, instead of counting on God. The founders of religious orders proceed with the audacity of this spirit of faith. They buy houses without having a penny, they receive the poor although they have nothing with which to feed them. Then, God performs miracles for them. The checks arrive and the granaries are filled. But, too often, generations later, everything is planned, calculated. One doesn’t incur an expense without being sure in advance to have enough to cover it. How can Providence manifest itself? And the same is true in the spiritual life. If a priest drafts all his sermons and his talks, down to the least comma, in order to be sure that he does not find himself wanting before his audience, and never has the audacity to begin preaching with a prayer and confidence in God as his only preparation, how can he have this beautiful experience of the Holy Spirit, Who speaks through his mouth? Does the Gospel not say, …do not worry about how to speak or what you should say; for what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes; because it will not be you who will be speaking, but the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you (Matthew 10:19)? Let us be very clear. Obviously we do not want to say that it is a bad thing to be able to anticipate things, to develop a budget or prepare one’s homilies. Our natural abilities are also instruments in the hands of Providence! But everything depends on the spirit in which we do things. We must clearly understand that there is an enormous difference in attitude of heart between one, who in fear of finding himself wanting because he does not believe in the intervention of God on behalf of those who lean on Him, programs everything in advance to the smallest detail and does not undertake anything except in the exact measure of its actual possibilities, and one who certainly undertakes legitimate things, but who abandons himself with confidence in God to provide all that is asked of him and who thus surpasses his own possibilities. And that which God demands of us always goes beyond our natural human possibilities!

The Bible is full of evidence that God’s attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a Great Cosmic Cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us—loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here—and—now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew—laden grass that is “renewed in the morning” (Ps 90:5), or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, “our inner nature is being renewed every day” (2 Cor 4:16). Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous attention to detail in the book of Leviticus, involving God in the minutiae of daily life—all the cooking and cleaning of a people’s domestic life—might be revisioned as the very love of God. A God who cares so much as to desire to be present to us in everything we do. It is this God who speaks to us through the psalmist as he wakes from sleep, amazed, to declare, “I will bless you, Lord, you give me counsel, and even at night direct my heart” (Ps 16:7, GR). It is this God who speaks to us through the prophets, reminding us that by meeting the daily needs of the poor and vulnerable, characterized in the scriptures as the widows and orphans, we prepare the way of the Lord and make our own hearts ready for the day of salvation. When it comes to the nitty—gritty, what ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God’s love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it gratefully, as a reality that humbles us even as it gives us cause for praise. The rhythm of sunrise and sunset marks a passage of time that makes each day rich with the possibility of salvation, a concept that is beautifully summed up in an ancient saying from the monastic tradition: “Abba Poeman said concerning Abba Pior that every day he made a new beginning.

You ever choked? You know what I mean, fumbled at the goal line, stuck your foot in your mouth when you were trying to ask that girl on a date, had a brain freeze on the final exam you were totally prepared for, lipped out a three-foot putt to win the golf tournament, or been paralyzed by the feeling of “Oh my god life can’t get any better, do I really deserve this?” I have. What happens when we get that feeling? We clench up, get short of breath, self-conscious. We have an out-of-body experience where we observe ourselves in the third person, no longer present, now not doing well what we are there to do. We become voyeurs of our moment because we let it become bigger than us, and in doing so, we just became less involved in it and more impressed with it. Why does this happen? It happens because when we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves, we then create a fictitious ceiling, a restriction, over the expectations we have of our own performance in that moment. We get tense, we focus on the outcome instead of the activity, and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result, or it’s too good to be true. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t, and it’s not our right to believe it does or is. Don’t create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great

We got pregnant with Angel almost by accident. I was thinking it was just about time to go on birth control and wham-it happened. We wanted two children, but were thinking of spacing them out a little more. God and Angel had other plans. I’m so glad. Bubba and Angel are so close in age and such good friends that I can’t imagine it any other way. But at the time, I was more than a little apprehensive about it. Once again, it worked out that Chris was preparing to leave just when I was due. They say God only gives you what you can handle. Chris didn’t cope with crying babies very well. So either he paid the military to deploy him with each baby, or God was looking out for him with well-timed, newborn-avoiding deployments. This time, the Team guy karma worked: the sonogram technician confirmed it was a girl several months into the pregnancy. She was going to be the first female born into the Kyle side of the family in eighty years. Which made her unique, and her grandparents particularly tickled. Chris couldn’t resist the opportunity to tease them with the news. “We’re having a boy,” he said when he called them back in Texas with the news. “Oh, how nice,” they said. “No, we’re having a girl.” “Whoo-hoo!” they shouted. “No, we’re having a boy.” “Chris! Which is it!?” “A girl!” If they could have gotten away to visit us that night, I doubt they would have needed an airplane to fly.

So here we find that the animals, and the plants, the vegetation, became living souls, and were created spiritually before they were naturally upon the earth. These are very significant expressions, and I am stressing them as evidence that contradicts and confutes the organic theory of evolution. . . . Evolution teaches production and development of all things by chance, development of the smallest germ to a man created in the image of God, requiring several billions of years for that development. Moreover, this process would, if true, produce on other earths, passing through similar conditions, beings of a most hideous and dreadful nature imaginable. As they teach it has produced some very hideous beings on this earth. There could be no intelligence in a Supreme Being who had each time an earth is formed to leave everything to chance hoping that in some great period of time from an amoeba, creatures would be developed, fit to possess an eternal spirit in his image. I want you to get that! The idea, for us, sons and daughters of God, to be led astray by these theories of men into thinking that things began way back in that far distant time by some chance, suddenly appearing. Why, conditions today are far more favorable to spontaneous life than they were according to the teachings of science, millions of years ago, and have not men struggled and done everything that they knew how to do to find spontaneous life, and in searching for it they have always been defeated. So I state, and have the evidence in this book. They have never found life coming only from antecedent life. God is the author of life, and that is one secret he has not revealed to man. . . . We are transplanted beings. Adam was transplanted. I do not want to get a misunderstanding when I say that. He did not come here a resurrected being. He did not die on some other earth and then come here to die again, to be changed to mortality again, for the resurrected being cannot die. . . . So, Adam was the first man upon the earth, according to the Lord's statement, and the first flesh also. That needs a little explanation. Adam did not come to this earth until it was prepared for him. The animals were here. Plants were here. The Lord did not bring him to a desolate world, and then bring other creatures. It was all prepared for him, just according to the order that is written in our scriptures, and when it was all ready for Adam he was placed upon the earth. Then what is meant by the "first flesh"? It is simple when you understand it. Adam was the first of all creatures to fall and become flesh, and flesh in this sense means mortality, and all through our scriptures the Lord speaks of this life as flesh, while we are here in the flesh, so Adam became the first flesh. There was no other mortal creature before him, and there was no mortal death until he brought it, and the scriptures tell you that. It is here written, and that is the gospel of Jesus Christ. . . . Here the Lord says to Adam that through the fall came death, and other statements of that kind are given in these scriptures. . . . Now, evolution leads men away from God. Men who have had faith in God, when they have become converted to that theory, forsake him. Charles Darwin was a religious man when he started out. I have told in this book something about what happened to him, and how his feelings changed, and what was beautiful to him in the beginning ceased to be beautiful to him thereafter. [Seek Ye Earnestly, 277-283]

What though some suffer and die, what though they lay down their lives for the testimony of Jesus and the hope of eternal life--so be it--all these things have prevailed from Adam's day to ours. They are all part of the eternal plan; and those who give their "all" in the gospel cause shall receive the Lord's "all" in the mansions which are prepared. . . . We have yet to gain that full knowledge and understanding of the doctrines of salvation and the mysteries of the kingdom that were possessed by many of the ancient Saints. O that we knew what Enoch and his people knew! Or that we had the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon, as did certain of the Jaredites and Nephites! How can we ever gain these added truths until we believe in full what the Lord has already given us in the Book of Mormon, in the Doctrine and Covenants, and in the inspired changes made by Joseph Smith in the Bible? Will the Lord give us the full and revealed account of the creation as long as we believe in the theories of evolution? Will he give us more guidance in governmental affairs as long as we choose socialistic ways which lead to the overthrow of freedom? We have yet to attain that degree of obedience and personal righteousness which will give us faith like the ancients: faith to multiply miracles, move mountains, and put at defiance the armies of nations; faith to quench the violence of fire, divide seas and stop the mouths of lions; faith to break every band and to stand in the presence of God. Faith comes in degrees. Until we gain faith to heal the sick, how can we ever expect to move mountains and divide seas? We have yet to receive such an outpouring of the Spirit of the Lord in our lives that we shall all see eye to eye in all things, that every man will esteem his brother as himself, that there will be no poor among us, and that all men seeing our good works will be led to glorify our Father who is in heaven. Until we live the law of tithing how can we expect to live the law of consecration? As long as we disagree as to the simple and easy doctrines of salvation, how can we ever have unity on the complex and endless truths yet to be revealed? We have yet to perfect our souls, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel, and to walk in the light as God is in the light, so that if this were a day of translation we would be prepared to join Enoch and his city in heavenly realms. How many among us are now prepared to entertain angels, to see the face of the Lord, to go where God and Christ are and be like them? . . . Our time, talents, and wealth must be made available for the building up of his kingdom. Should we be called upon to sacrifice all things, even our lives, it would be of slight moment when weighed against the eternal riches reserved for those who are true and faithful in all things. [Ensign, Apr. 1980, 25]

Sacrifice is a notoriously hard concept to understand. Indeed, it is not a univocal concept, but is a name used for a variety of actions that attempt communication between the human and the divine or transcendent spheres.7 Contemplation of the abyss reveals the enormity and complexity of the evil that has been perpetrated upon a society. What would it take to overcome it? The images of cross and blood figure prominently in the Pauline language of reconciliation (cf. Rom 5:9; Col 1:20; Eph 2:13-16). Both cross and blood have paradoxical meanings that allow them to bridge the distance between the divine and human worlds, between life and death. The cross was the ultimate sign of Roman power over a conquered and colonized people. To be crucified was the most dishonorable and humiliating of ways to die. The cross stood as a sign of reassertion of Roman power and the capacity to reject and exclude utterly. Yet it was through the crucified Christ that God chose to reconcile the world. The apparent triumph of worldly power is turned against itself and becomes “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). For John, the cross is at once instrument of humiliation and Christ's throne of glory (Jn 12:32). Similarly, blood is a sign of the divine life that God has breathed into every living being, and its shedding is a sign of death. The blood of the cross (Col 1:20) becomes the means of reconciling all things to God. In its being shed, the symbol of violence and death becomes the symbol of reconciliation and peace. To understand sacrifice, one must be prepared to inhabit the space within these paradoxes. Sacrifice understood in this way is not about the abuse of power, but about a transformation of power. A spirituality of reconciliation can be deepened by a meditation on the stories of the women and the tomb. These stories invite us to place inside them our experience of marginalization, of being incapable of imagining a way out of a traumatic past, of dealing with the kinds of absence that traumas create. They invite us to let the light of the resurrection—a light that even the abyss cannot extinguish—penetrate those absences.

When I Have to Confess Something to My Husband Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. JAMES 5:16 THERE ARE TIMES in every wife’s life when she needs to confess something to her husband that will be hard for him to hear. For example, if she has dented the car, or spent too much money, or overdrawn the bank account, or accidentally given away his favorite football shirt—or something even worse—and she knows his reaction to what she has to tell him will not be good, she needs help from above. If this happens to you, the thing to do is pray before you speak. If you have something to tell your husband you know he will not approve of, ask God to help you break it to him in the best way possible. Don’t just blurt it out. Ask God to prepare your husband’s heart to hear hard things without having a bad reaction to them. Ask the Lord to give you the right words to say and the right time to say it. There may be occasions when your husband needs to confess something to you, and you will want to set a good example of calm and patience for him to want to emulate. If you feel your husband overreacts to things, pray that God will give him a compassionate and understanding heart and an even temper. Ask God to plant in him the desire to pray for you instead of criticize or lecture. After you seek your husband’s forgiveness, tell him how effective it would be to pray together about this so that it never happens again. My Prayer to God LORD, help me to speak to my husband about what I know I need to confess to him. Give me the words to say. Open his heart to receive what I need to tell him with a good and godly attitude. If it is something I know I did wrong, help me to not do it again. Give me the wisdom and discernment I need to avoid that in the future. Where it is something I did that I feel was not wrong, but I know he will not be happy about it, help us to talk calmly and peacefully about this issue. Enable us to come to an agreement regarding what should be done in the future. Give my husband and me compassionate attitudes that don’t resort to anger. Help us to talk peacefully and come to a mutual understanding so that we always exhibit respect for each other. Teach us to believe for the best in each other. When I have to confess something that is hard for him to hear, reign in both of our hearts so that our words glorify You. Where there are things that should be confessed to each other but have been hidden because of not wanting to stir up anything negative, I pray You would help us to get these things out in the open honestly. Your Word says that confessing our trespasses—both to You and to each other—can be a prelude to healing, not only of body and soul but also of our relationship and marriage. Enable us to freely confess and freely pray for each other so that we may find the healing we need. In Jesus’ name I pray.

Every year before the Days of Awe, the Ba-al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, held a competition to see who would blow the shofar for him on Rosh Hashanah. Now if you wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov, not only did you have to blow the shofar like a virtuoso, but you also had to learn an elaborate system of kavanot — secret prayers that were said just before you blew the shofar to direct the shofar blasts and to see that they had the proper effect in the supernal realms. All the prospective shofar blowers practiced these kavanot for months. They were difficult and complex. There was one fellow who wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba-al Shem Tov so badly that he had been practicing these kavanot for years. But when his time came to audition before the Ba-al Shem, he realized that nothing he had done had prepared him adequately for the experience of standing before this great and holy man, and he choked. His mind froze completely. He couldn’t remember one of the kavanot he had practiced for all those years. He couldn’t even remember what he was supposed to be doing at all. He just stood before the Ba-al Shem in utter silence, and then, when he realized how egregiously — how utterly — he had failed this great test, his heart just broke in two and he began to weep, sobbing loudly, his shoulders heaving and his whole body wracking as he wept. All right, you’re hired, the Ba-al Shem said. But I don’t understand, the man said. I failed the test completely. I couldn’t even remember one kavanah. So the Ba-al Shem explained with the following parable: In the palace of the King, there are many secret chambers, and there are secret keys for each chamber, but one key unlocks them all, and that key is the ax. The King is the Lord of the Universe, the Ba-al Shem explained. The palace is the House of God. The secret chambers are the sefirot, the ascending spiritual realms that bring us closer and closer to God when we perform commandments such as blowing the shofar with the proper intention, and the secret keys are the kavanot. And the ax — the key that opens every chamber and brings us directly into the presence of the King, where he may be — the ax is the broken heart, for as it says in the Psalms, “God is close to the brokenhearted.

In your light we see light. —Psalm 36:9 (NIV) ELENA ZELAYETA, BLIND CHEF Without warning at age thirty-six, Elena Zelayeta, pregnant with her second child, totally lost her sight. She had been the chef at a popular restaurant she and her husband owned. A sixty-seven-year-old widow now, she continued to prepare her famous Mexican dishes, marketing them with the help of her two sons, the younger of whom she’d never seen. Typical of San Francisco, it was raining when I arrived at her home. The door was opened by a very short, very broad woman with a smile like the sun. Well under five feet tall, “and wide as I am high,” she said, she led me on a fast-paced tour of the sizable house, ending in the kitchen, where pots bubbled and a frying pan sizzled. Was it possible that this woman who moved so swiftly and surely, who was now so unhesitatingly dishing up the meal she’d prepared for the two of us, really blind? She must see, dimly at least, the outlines of things. At the door to the dining room, Elena paused, half a dozen dishes balanced on her arms. “Is the light on?” she asked. No, she confirmed, not the faintest glimmer of light had she seen in thirty years. But she smiled as she said it. “I hear the rain,” she went on as she expertly carved the herb-crusted chicken, “and I’m sure it’s a gray day for the sighted. But for us blind folk, when we walk with God, the sun is always shining.” Let me walk in Your light, Lord, whatever the weather of the world. —Elizabeth Sherrill Digging Deeper: Ps 97:11; 1 Jn 1:5

Chapter 13 - 1 Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken. And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

My own theological views are those of an agnostic—one who doesn’t know. I do not know whether there is a Divine designer or not. As an agnostic, what impresses me first of all is the woeful limits of our human knowledge. I respect the power of reason, but I also respect those aspects of religious faith that are compassionate and consoling. Many people could not live their lives without the consolation of faith. The virtues of religion should not be dismissed lightly. The Christian testament has a beautiful phrase for our limited human understanding: “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”13 Believers trust the biblical promise that all our questions will be answered when we meet God face-to-face in eternity. That promise is the heart of religious faith. For an agnostic, that promise is a reminder that our knowledge in this life is incomplete. We are well into the twenty-first century, and we marvel at the spectacular achievements of science. But science still does not know how the universe was created or how life began. The Book of Proverbs contains a warning that speaks to us in our uncertain state: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”14 Those who believe they are changing the world, or saving the planet, or transforming the human race, are intoxicated with self-aggrandizing pride. As secular “redeemers,” a haughty spirit is their second nature. Consequently, they are deaf to this biblical wisdom. The secularists are confident that the nonexistence of God is a self-evident fact. It infuriates them that religionists (or “irrationalists,” as Bill Maher calls them) resist what they think is obviously, indisputably true. Believing they know a truth that cannot be known, and that others resist, they are prepared to use any means necessary to silence their opponents and achieve their goals.

Dryness and the Dark Night”:2 A certain scientist devoted his life to developing a strain of butterfly that would be the most beautiful combination of colors ever seen on this planet. After years of experimentation, he was certain that he had a cocoon that would produce his genetic masterpiece. On the day that the butterfly was expected to emerge, he gathered together his entire staff. All waited breathlessly as the creature began to work its way out of the cocoon. It disengaged its right wing, its body, and most of its left wing. Just as the staff were ready to cheer and pass the champagne and cigars, they saw with horror that the extremity of the left wing of the butterfly was stuck in the mouth of the cocoon. The creature was desperately flapping its other wing to free itself. As it labored, it grew more and more exhausted. Each new effort seemed more difficult, and the intervals between efforts grew longer. At last the scientist, unable to bear the tension, took a scalpel and cut a tiny section from the mouth of the cocoon. With one final burst of strength, the butterfly fell free onto the laboratory table. Everybody cheered and reached for the cigars and the champagne. Then silence again descended on the room. Although the butterfly was free, it could not fly. . . The struggle to escape from the cocoon is nature’s way of forcing blood to the extremities of a butterfly’s wings so that when it emerges from the cocoon it can enjoy its new life and fly to its heart’s content. In seeking to save the creature’s life, the scientist had truncated its capacity to function. A butterfly that cannot fly is a contradiction in terms. This is a mistake that God is not going to make. The image of God watching Anthony has to be understood. God holds back his infinite mercy from rushing to the rescue when we are in temptation and difficulties. He will not actively intervene because the struggle is opening and preparing every recess of our being for the divine energy of grace. God is transforming us so that we can enjoy the divine life to the full once it has been established. If the divine help comes too soon, before the work of purification and healing has been accomplished, it may frustrate our ultimate ability to live the divine life.

Do you believe in God, Aunt Elner?” “Sure I do, honey, why?” “How old were you when you started believing, do you remember?” Aunt Elner paused for a moment. “I never thought about not believing. Never did question it. I guess believing is just like math: some people get it right out of the chute, and some have to struggle for it. (...) Oh, I know a lot of people struggle, wondering is there really a God. They sit and think and worry over it all their life. The good Lord had to make smart people but I don’t think he did them any favors because it seems the smart ones start questioning things from the get go. But I never did. I’m one of the lucky ones. I thank God every night, my brain is just perfect for me, not too dumb, not too bright. You know, your daddy was always asking questions.” “He was?” “I remember one day he said, ‘Aunt Elner, how do you know there is a God, how can you be sure?’ ” “What did you tell him?” “I said, ‘Well, Gene, the answer is right on the end of your fingertips.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well, think about it. Every single human being that was ever born from the beginning of time has a completely different set of fingerprints. Not two alike. Not a single one out of all the billions is ever repeated.’ I said, ‘Who else but God could think up all those different patterns and keep coming up with new ones year after year, not to mention all the color combinations of all the fish and birds.’ ” Dena smiled. “What did he say?” “He said, ‘Yes, but, Aunt Elner, how do you know that God’s not repeating old fingerprints from way back and reusing them on us?’ ” She laughed. “See what I mean? Yes, God is great, all right. He only made one mistake but it was a big one.” “What was that?” “Free will. That was his one big blunder. He gave us a choice whether or not to be good or bad. He made us too independent … and you can’t tell people what to do; they won’t listen. You can tell them to be good until you’re blue in the face but people don’t want to be preached at except at church, where they know what they are getting and are prepared for it.” “What’s life all about, Aunt Elner? Don’t you ever wonder what the point of the whole thing is?” “No, not really; it seems to me we only have one big decision in this life, whether to be good or bad. That’s what I came up with a long time ago. Of course, I may be wrong, but I’m not going to spend any time worrying over it, I’m just going to have a good time while I’m here. Live and let live.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel “T hey shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us)” (Matthew 1:23 ESV). This is perhaps our oldest Christmas carol. Historians say its roots go back to the 8th century. In its earliest form, it was a “plain song” or a chant and the monks sang it a cappella. It was sung or chanted in Latin during the seven days leading up to Christmas. Translated into English by John Mason Neale in 1851, we sing it to the tune “Veni, Emmanuel,” a 15th-century melody. Many churches sing it early in the Advent season because of its plaintive tone of expectant waiting. Traditionally Advent centers on the Old Testament preparation for the coming of the Messiah who will establish his kingdom on the earth. When the words form a prayer that Christ will come and “ransom captive Israel,” we ought to remember the long years of Babylonian captivity. Each verse of this carol features a different Old Testament name or title of the coming Messiah: “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” “O come, Thou Wisdom from on high.” “O come, Thou Rod of Jesse.” “O come, Thou Day-spring.” “O come, Thou Key of David.” “O come, Thou Lord of Might.” “O come, Desire of Nations.” This carol assumes a high level of biblical literacy. That fact might argue against singing it today because so many churchgoers don’t have any idea what “Day-spring” means or they think Jesse refers to a wrestler or maybe to a reality TV star. But that argument works both ways. We ought to sing this carol and we ought to use it as a teaching tool. Sing it—and explain it! We can see the Jewish roots of this carol in the refrain: Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. But Israel’s Messiah is also our Savior and Lord. What Israel was waiting for turns out to be the long-expected Jesus. So this carol rightly belongs to us as well. The first verse suggests the longing of the Jewish people waiting for Messiah to come: O come, O come, Emmanuel And ransom captive Israel That mourns in lonely exile here Until the Son of God appears The second verse pictures Christ redeeming us from hell and death: O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free Thine own from Satan’s tyranny From depths of Hell Thy people save And give them victory o’er the grave This verse reminds us only Christ can take us home to heaven: O come, Thou Key of David, come, And open wide our heavenly home; Make safe the way that leads on high, And close the path to misery. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel Shall come to thee, O Israel. Let’s listen as Selah captures the Jewish flavor of this carol. Lord, we pray today for all those lost in the darkness of sin. We pray for those who feel there is no hope. May the light of Jesus shine in their hearts today. Amen.

If the hunger for paradise is wired into your heart (and it is), either you will realize that this present life has been designed as a preparation for the paradise to come, or you will do your best and work your hardest to turn the present moment into the paradise it will never be. You and I live in a broken world that right now will not be the paradise we seek. You and I are flawed people, living with flawed people, and collectively we have no ability whatsoever to deliver paradise to one another. Every place you go and every created thing you handle has been damaged by the fall. This simply is not and won’t be the paradise you seek. For all who have placed their trust in the Savior, paradise is a secure reality. The paradise for which your heart longs is coming, but you will not experience it right here, right now. No, God has chosen to keep you in this broken world in order to use its brokenness to prepare you for what is to come. The brokenness you live in the middle of, and the difficulties you face there, are not in the way of God’s good plan for you; they are an important ingredient in it. Right now, God is not so much working to change your surroundings but to change you so that you are ready for the new surroundings he has planned and purchased for you in his grace. Simply said, either you are waiting by faith for the paradise to come, or you are working with your hands to build paradise in the here and now. Looking for paradise in the here and now is another ingredient of the money madness inside many of us and has overtaken the culture around us. We frenetically spend on material things, physical experiences, and new locations in the search of a piece of paradise. Our hearts long for the freedom from external difficulty and internal emptiness that we so often feel. We instinctively know that there must be more, that this can’t be it. Deep within us we feel like we’re missing something. So in our eternity amnesia we don’t lift up our eyes to look afar and consider the glories that are coming. No, we open our wallets and look around at what may have the potential to give us the paradise we are seeking. And because nothing can deliver it, we spend from thing to thing to thing, hoping that the next thing will deliver. But we don’t end up with paradise. We end up with houses that are bigger and more luxurious than we need, cars that are more identity markers than means of transportation, a pile of possessions, many of which lie unused, amassed debt, and wallets that are empty. But the paradise that we’ve spent to get has eluded us. Sure, budgets are helpful, but only if they are a piece of handling our money with eternity in view. When it comes to money, the PMP that lives inside us and that has captured our culture just cannot work. It will cause you to spend too much, it will tempt you to spend unwisely, and for all of your investment, it will leave you empty in the end.

A flamenco dancer, lurking under a shadow, prepares of the terror of her dance. Somebody has wounded her with words, alluding to the fact that she has no fire, or ‘duende’. She knows she has to dance her way past her limitations, and that this may destroy her forever. She has to fail, or she has to die. I want to dwell for a little while on this dancer because, though a very secular example, she speaks very well for the power of human transcendence. I want you to imagine this frail woman. I want you to see her in deep shadow, and fear. When the music starts, she begins to dance, with ritual slowness. Then she stamps out the dampness from her soul. Then she stamps fire into her loins. She takes on a strange enchanted glow. With a dark tragic rage, shouting, she hurls her hungers, her doubts, her terrors, and her secular prayer for more light into the spaces around her. All fire and fate, she spins her enigma around us, and pulls into the awesome risk of her dance. She is taking herself apart before our sceptical gaze. She is disintegrating, shouting and stamping and dissolving the boundaries of her body. Soon, she becomes a wild unknown force, glowing in her death, dancing from her wound, dying in her dance. And when she stops – strangely gigantic in her new fiery stature – she is like one who has survived the most dangerous journey of all. I can see her now as she stands shining in celebration of her own death. In the silence that follows, no one moves. The fact is that she has destroyed us all. Why do I dwell on this dancer? I dwell on her because she represents for me the courage to go beyond ourselves. While she danced she became the dream of the freest and most creative people we had always wanted to be, in whatever it is we do. She was the sea we never ran away to, the spirit of wordless self-overcoming we never quite embrace. She destroyed us because we knew in our hearts that rarely do we rise to the higher challenges in our lives, or our work, or our humanity. She destroyed us because rarely do we love our tasks and our lives enough to die and thus be reborn into the divine gift of our hidden genius. We seldom try for that beautiful greatness brooding in the mystery of our blood. You can say in her own way, and in that moment, that she too was a dancer to God. That spirit of the leap into the unknown, that joyful giving of the self’s powers, that wisdom of going beyond in order to arrive here – that too is beyond words. All art is a prayer for spiritual strength. If we could be pure dancers in spirit, we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom. We would not be afraid of speech, and we would be serene with silence. We would learn to live beyond words, among the highest things. We wouldn't need words. Our smile, our silences would be sufficient. Our creations and the beauty of our functions would be enough. Our giving would be our perpetual gift.

Enjoyment requires discernment. It can be a gift to wrap up in a blanket and lose myself in a TV show but we can also amuse ourselves to death. My pleasure in wine or tea or exercise is good in itself but it can become disordered. As we learn to practice enjoyment we need to learn the craft of discernment: How to enjoy rightly, to have, to read pleasure well. There is a symbiotic relationship, cross-training, if you will, between the pleasures we find in gathered worship and those in my tea cup, or in a warm blanket, or the smell of bread baking. Lewis reminds us that one must walk before one can run. We will not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable but we shall not have found Him so. These tiny moments of beauty in our day train us in the habits of adoration and discernment, and the pleasure and sensuousness of our gathered worship teach us to look for and receive these small moments in our days, together they train us in the art of noticing and reveling in our God’s goodness and artistry. A few weeks ago I was walking to work, standing on the corner of tire and auto parts store, waiting to cross the street when I suddenly heard church bells begin to ring, loud and long. I froze, riveted. They were beautiful. A moment of transcendence right in the middle of the grimy street, glory next to the discount tire and auto parts. Liturgical worship has been referred to sometimes derisively as smells and bells because of the sensuous ways Christians have historically worshipped: Smells, the sweet and pungent smell of incense, and bells, like the one I heard in neighborhood which rang out from a catholic church. At my church we ring bells during the practice of our eucharist. The acolyte, the person often a child, assisting the priest, rings chimes when our pastor prepares the communion meal. There is nothing magic about these chimes, nothing superstitious, they’re just bells. We ring them in the eucharist liturgy as a way of saying, “pay attention.” They’re an alarm to rouse the congregation to jostle us to attention, telling us to take note, sit up, and lean forward, and notice Christ in our midst. We need this kind of embodied beauty, smells and bells, in our gathered worship, and we need it in our ordinary day to remind us to take notice of Christ right where we are. Dostoevsky wrote that “beauty will save the world.” This might strike us as mere hyperbole but as our culture increasingly rejects the idea and language of truth, the churches role as the harbinger of beauty is a powerful witness to the God of all beauty. Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his poem, “One more day,” “Though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.” And when people cease to believe there is good and evil, only beauty will call to them and save them so that they still know how to say, “this is true and that is false.” Being curators of beauty, pleasure, and delight is therefore and intrinsic part of our mission, a mission that recognizes the reality that truth is beautiful. These moments of loveliness, good tea, bare trees, and soft shadows, or church bells, in my dimness, they jolt me to attention and remind me that Christ is in our midst. His song of truth, sung by His people all over the world, echos down my ordinary street, spilling even into my living room.