Nothing Wrong in Doubting

“There’s nothing wrong in doubting. It sometimes leads to greater faith.”
― Anne McCaffrey, The Dragonriders of Pern

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Making the Most of Lie

If I can throw a single ray of light across the darkened pathway of another; if I can aid some soul to clearer sight of life and duty, and thus bless my brother; if I can wipe from any human cheek a tear, I shall not have lived my life in vain while here.

One Day at a Time

One day at a time, with its failure and fears,
With its hurts and mistakes, with its weakness and tears,
With its portion of pain and its burden of care;
One day at a time we must meet and must bear.
One day at a time to be patient and strong;
To be calm under trial and sweet under wrong;
Then its toiling shall pass and its sorrow shall cease;
It shall darken and die, and the night shall bring peace.
One day at a time—but the day is so long,
And the heart is not brave, and the soul is not strong,
O thou pitying Christ, be Thou near all the way;
Give courage and patience and strength for the day.
Swift cometh His answer, so clear and so sweet:
“Yea, I will be with thee, thy troubles to meet;
I will not forget thee, nor fail thee, nor grieve,
I will not forsake thee; I never will leave.”
Not yesterday’s load we are called on to bear,
Nor the morrow’s uncertain and shadowy care,
Why should we look forward or back with dismay?
Our needs, as our mercies, are but for the day.
One day at a time, and the day is His day;
He hath numbered its hours, though they haste or delay.
His grace is sufficient; we walk not alone;
As the day, so the strength that He giveth His own.

 

Spiritual Antidotes

Ways to destroy yourself and waste into nothing, to drift far away from Jesus…and antidotes.

Unrealized Blessings

“Perhaps it takes a purer faith to praise God for unrealized blessings than for those we once enjoyed or those we enjoy now.”

When We Are Defeated

When we are defeated and God does not speak, He is leading us to the end of ourselves and to a complete confidence in Him. There is no substitute for that. We try to help God out, and inflate our faith, and make long prayers, but nothing happens. There is prayer which shows no self-confidence, which cries out in the midst of doubt and fear: “I don’t know whether it is any use or not to do so, but I believe!” God can use faith that is exercised in the midst of extreme doubt. Faith as small as a grain of mustard seed.

Believe What They Can

“People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn’t seen some of it.”
— The Princess and the Goblin

I Choose to Believe

I choose

to believe

That God Himself

And what He chooses to provide

At this moment

Are all I truly need

My inner longings are completed

Others May, You May Not

If God has called you to be really like Christ in all your spirit, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility and put on you such demands of obedience, that He will not allow you to follow other Christians, and in many ways He will seem to let other good people do things which He will not let you do.

Faith

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. …A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means – the only complete realist. Very well, then. The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues is that we fail.”

To Have Faith in Christ

“[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

Living By Faith

“Living by faith includes the call to something greater than cowardly self-preservation.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings)

I Do Not Believe

“I do not believe this darkness will endure. ”
— J.R.R. Tolkien

May It Be a Light

“May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)