discipleship

The better you get, the better you better get.

there was a common understanding that religion generally served the powerful, who manipulated the words of the gods and prophets to justify their greed and lust for power. Yet Christianity comes in numerous guises; mystical to dogmatic; it is used by some as a reason to justify their wars, their oppression and their hatreds. Others use it to oppose those wars and other injustices.

Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.

pessimists see people as liabilities to manage, as burdens or threats that we must minimize.

Salvation is the creation of new desires, not just new goodies.

The only way your child will grow out of their dependency into self-sufficient adults is for you to essentially abandon your own independence for 20 years or so.

For a long time, I thought I was good at relationships because I was charming.

Never base motivation or fear, entirely.

It is not a brave thing to trust God. To true believers, it is a sweet necessity.

wonderful people are made, not born _ that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.

He did wrong. He has acknowledged it before the people. He repents it. How many kings have the humility to do that?

He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the great matters of state.

Blessing and obedience do comfortably and mysteriously coexist.

A servile spirit you have nothing to do with: you are not a slave, but a child; and now, inasmuch as you are a beloved child, you are bound to obey your Father's faintest wish, the least intimation of His will.

It was too late for he and his father to have an adventure, and NOTHING seemed to have any color anymore.

I love the quaint saying of a dying man, who exclaimed, "I have no fear of going home; I have sent all before me; God's finger is on the latch of my door, and I am ready for Him to enter.

Dost thou want another eye beside that of Him who sees every secret thing?

The author, at the time a Carter speechwriter in the 1980 campaign, showed visible distress at his boss's performance and was warned by a friend in the traveling press, lest he become the story.