What They Say

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, so I've decided to post a few golden lines, a few quotes that have made an impression.

Psalm 55 (the whole thing--it's great)

"Idolatry is taking an incomplete joy and building your life around it." --... (don't remember where this comes from. it is oh so true, though.)

"Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to craw back--to be sucked back--into it?" --C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)

"Writer Anne Lamott says that the most powerful sermon in the world is two words. 'Me too.' Me too. When you're struggling, when you're hurting, wounded, limping, doubting, questioning, barely hanging on, moments away from another relapse, and somebody can identify with you--someone knows the temptations that are at your door, somebody has felt the pain that you are feeling, when someone can look you in the eyes and say, 'Me too,' and they actually mean--it can save you." --Rob Bell (Jesus Wants to Save Christians)

"Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt...and pain is not only immediately recognizable evil, but evil impossible to ignore...pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." --CSL (The Problem With Pain)

"Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress." --CSL (The Problem With Pain)

"Sometimes it takes a little pain to get us to do the right thing." --RB (Jesus Wants to Save Christians)

"Sometimes it is hard not to say, 'God forgive God.' Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, he didn't. He crucified Him." --CSL (A Grief Observed)

"Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it. that, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it." --CSL (The Weight of Glory)

"It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life...how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us." --CSL (The Weight of Glory)

"Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart, don't know how to laugh either." --Golda Meir, former Israeli Prime Minister (got this one from a good friend's blog--thanks Addie Jo)