If I can’t find something worthwhile in my own reflection, how am I ever going to see anything worthwhile in the face of another? Maybe I can solve all of this by seeing the face of Jesus in everyone, starting with myself.
Beating the impossible never starts when we reach for the stars. Rather, it starts when we fall to our knees.
I am terrified by the horrors that lurk all around me. But it would do me good to remember that those same horrors are terrified by the God who resides within me.
Žmogaus dieviškumą paslėpsime jo sielos gelmėse, nes tai vienintelė vieta, kurioje jis niekada nemėgins jos ieškoti. Brahma
Pasakykite man, kas yra Dievas, ir pasakysiu jums, ar jį tikiu.
Aš priklausau ne bažnyčiai, Alisa, o Dievui. Tai ego skatina žmogų save laikyti kataliku, budistu ar musulmonu. Ego siekia priklausyti kokiai nors stovyklai, kad būtų išskirtinis ir atsiskirtų nuo kitų. O tikras dvasinis polėkis, priešingai, skatina atsisakyti ego troškimo priklausyti bei tapatintis ir padeda pajusti vienybę su kitais, su visata ir Dievu...
In life when God calls you, answer.
In life when people count you out, count on God and count your blessings.
It is in boldly unleashing our faith that we effectively leash our fears.
Kai nesigėdydami apsinuoginsite ir paimsite savo rūbus, ir, numetę sau po kojų, mindysite juos (...), tada nebijosite. J. K.
God is neither intimidated by the depth nor the height of your troubles; nor is He blind to them. He will show up in due time.
If I understand death as a temporary loss that is irrevocably swallowed up by the eternal existence within which it occurs, I suddenly realize that it is the death of something that enriches the life of everything.
Prayer is where I trade the rhetoric of men the for the promises of God. It is where I petition perfection instead of count on those who someone survived an election. It is to accept the incomprehensible invitation of God to have this weak voice of mine thunder down the halls of heaven and roll up to the throne of the God of all eternity so that as small as I am, I might have an audience with this “King of kings.” It is where my fatigue becomes a stage upon which God can unveil His strength in stunning fashion, and where my fear is obliterated by His courage. Prayer is where I rise above this tangled world and find myself enveloped by a world that I visit today, but will live in tomorrow. Prayer is utterly indispensable to this cringing existence, for unless I rise above it I will be consumed by the darkness of it. Prayer is this and does this and will always be this.
I don’t fight battles by penning words or crafting syntax designed to bring people to tears by liberating their hearts or calling out their souls. Nor do I fight them by sitting with untold thousands and granting them counsel in the darkness of their darkest hours. No. Rather, I fight them prone on my knees in morning’s darkness before the sun has roused a wounded world awake to feel its pain yet again. I fight them throughout the day as I “pray without ceasing” because troubles befall us without ceasing. I fight them by praying for the impossible in lives devastated beyond redemption, for rogue nations that spread destruction as though destroying life was the answer to life, for the weak who stand teetering precariously on some emotional or relational or financial abyss, and for an impossible number of situations that everyone else has deemed as impossible. I fight in prayer. And despite the massive weaponry available to mankind, I am utterly convinced that a single man on his knees in humble petition before God exceeds the armament of all the world’s nations combined. This is what I believe. And therefore, this is how I fight.
How do I tell you what prayer is? It is everything that I need every time I kneel in the practice of it. It shakes the infinite alive and sets its armies afoot in defense of me. It will never run aground or find itself drowning in the waters of the adversity that I bring to it. Nothing it faces is insurmountable, for to think that such an adversary exists is to run a fool’s errand. It will shield me in its advance, it will beckon me to anticipate the miracles that it is about to wield, and in the midst of it all it calms me as it whispers, “Be still and know that I am God.” And because of these reasons and a million more, I find prayer the single greatest place that I could ever imagine being.
I am convinced beyond words to convey that prayer is infinitely more than the mindless ranting of some poor, delusional soul talking to some imaginary friend in some imaginary place. Oh, to the contrary. Prayer is the manifest pleading of a soul worn raw that, by the simple act of prayer, unleashes untold forces that we can’t imagine that surge in a descent so massive and so inconceivably powerful that the ground of everything before them shakes. And in this descent lives are changed beyond recognition, nations are transformed beyond comprehension, and history is brought to its knees in the face of a God who says “be healed.” That, my friend, is nothing of a delusional soul or imaginary friend or any other such nonsense.
I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have come to prayer broken far beyond any conceivable hope of repair. I have likewise come without anywhere to turn simply because, much like myself, everything around me lies broken beyond repair. And I cannot tell you how many times God has taken that which is broken and has used it to do what could never have done should any of that had been whole.
Prayer penetrates the underside of heaven and sends the full force of an invisible realm hurdling against the adversaries that are too naïve to understand what’s about to descend upon them.
Should all the hoards of mankind assemble as one and bring the full force of their numbers against us, we must remember that one man standing alone with God remains an immovable majority.
To end my life having exhausted the whole of it in the pursuit of worldly things means that I will die holding no things. But to exhaust the whole of it in the pursuit of God means that I will die holding all things. And the difference between the two is everything.
