هل أنا من أخلق دراما حياتى أم أنت ؟! أجبنى يا الله ...أجبنى ولو بعلامة بإشارة ..أعلم أن العلامات، والإشارات إنما تختص بها أولياءك الصالحين...لكنى أستحلفك بذاتك العلّية، وبقدوس أسمائك السماوية، وبكل ما فتحت، وتفتح به عليّ. أن تفتح يا إلهى عليّ بخيرك الوفير، وتصطفينى مع عبادك الأبرار، وتعاملني معاملة الأخيار الأطهار. أعلم أنى لست منهم، لكنها فضائل رحمتك، وفيوض عظيم قدرتك عليّ يا الله...يا الله أرنى علامة تفتح بها عليّ ، لأعلم ما هو عليّ عصى، لأرى حقيقة ما في قلبي وأراك ...لن أسالك كما سألك موسي من قبل ..بأن أراك رؤية العين ، لكنى أستحلفك بك أن أراك رؤية القلب.
And what's God if not a puppeteer...one who makes us dance...one who craves and demands attention?
We have cast surrender as weak. However, if surrender to God makes us everything we could never be on our own, then weakness would, in fact, be the unwillingness to surrender.
You can live without God, but to do so is to live without living.
Prayer is the humble man laying prostrate before an Infinite God. And although it may seem utterly ludicrous, a man such as this is one of the most powerful men that you will find anywhere on the face on the earth.
If I were to eliminate all of the things that I ‘want,’ I would be left with all of the things that I ‘need.’ And inevitably, such an action would leave me standing before God caught up in the stunning realization that in Him is everything that I ‘want’ and all that I ‘need.’ And how is it that I could not ‘need’ God and ‘want’ both?
He used to say, God is everywhere. In the work of your hands; in the beating of a bird's wings; in the roots of an oak and in the stones of the riverbed. In the rising of the sun. In the heart of a man. In the wonders we know, and those that are beyond our knowing.
We all are struggling with the tension of believing, or expecting things which we cannot prove.
In walking with God it’s not about knowing the facts. Rather, it’s about knowing the God Who knows the facts.
When we pray for something to God, He may not give us everything. He may not give it to us at once. Or He may not even give it to us in the same sequence we asked for. Sometimes, He gives us the second thing first so that we can achieve the first one through it.
Life tears us apart, but through those wounds, if we have tended them, love may enter us. It might be the live of someone you have lost. It may be the love of your own spirit for the self that at times you think you hate. However it comes though, in all these—of all these and yet more than they, so much more—there burns the abiding love of God. But if you find that you cannot believe in God, then do not worry yourself with it. No one can say what names or forms God might take, nor gauge the intensity of unbelief we may need to wake up our souls.
It is true that Christ makes a man anew, that there is some ultimate change in him. But part of that change is the ability to see your life as a whole, to feel the form and unity of it, to become a creature made for and assimilated into existence, rather than a desperate, fragmented man striving against existence or caught forever just outside of it.
Only if we share Christ's death on earth will we share his life in heaven.
How do we explain God? Maybe we explain Him as unexplainable.
The only real, practical measure of my appreciation for the goodness and mercy of God to me is the extent to which I am, in turn, prepared to show goodness and mercy to others.
Much of our effort to do things for the Lord is really the resurgence of our desire to dominate and make things happen in our own strength.
In God’s providence we have four gospels! For Jesus Christ is too great and glorious a person to be captured by one author or one perspective.
Souls are won for Christ by tears and sweat and pain, especially in prayer and in sacrificial personal friendship.
I envied her for her faith, which had kept her strong and helped her resist the same pressures I had surrendered to … This woman, I realized, loved God so much that she feared disappointing Him more than she feared death.
The lyrics that I sing in my head dictate the attitude of my heart. And because that’s the case, I’d prefer the music of God to the songs of men.
