Quotes from Catherine Marshall

Did people always have to wait for pestilence or war or tragedy to be shocked into forgetting about themselves?

I sat there thinking about how all real music has to be born in the human spirit. Well, these ballads surely had been. There was something childlike and basic about them, an absence of sham or pretense.

The secret of her calm seemed to be that she was not trying to prove anything. She was—that was all. And her stance toward life seemed to say: God is—and that is enough.

Always their men would be fighters, quick to take offense, slow to forgive. To their children and to their children's children they would hand down their love of race, their personal loyalties, their stubbornnesses, their distrust of governments, their servility to no man. These are their strengths and their weaknesses, their glory—and sometimes, Christy, their damnation.

Dear God,' I said inside myself, 'when I came here, maybe I was partly running off from home for fun and freedom and adventure. But I have a notion that You had something else in mind in letting me come. Anyway if You can use me here in this Cove, well, here I am.

His theology is mostly focused on helping people with their physical needs. All that's important, of course, but he'll hit a dry spell someday and need something more than social causes to keep him going. ... if you're serious about writing on the deeper life, you simply cannot ignore the centrality of Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Quietly, Miss Alice was demonstrating this God of love and beauty too—in small ways and in large. For a few, the concept that life did not have to be all starkness and misery was slowly taking root. Tentatively, timidly—constantly encouraged by Miss Alice—some of the women were at last reaching out for light and beauty and joy.

In my journal I logged this comment: On the day that I was officially a grown woman, I felt anything but feminine rather, befouled from the sweat of hard physical labor and the stinking mud. I wanted nothing so much as to sleep for a week.

The lake is lovely, I commented, And so big. I still find it hard to believe it's artificial. Oh, it's artificial, all right. Dive deep and you may bash your head on tree stumps.

Don't need no more of this world's goods. Some folks gits plumb mesmerized when paper money is shook afore their eyes.

There's fire in you, Julie. I can see you out there in the street, carrying a banner for all the underprivileged people of the world.

For years I lived in inner terror that I was, at heart, a weak and indecisive man. I think it was this fear that made me sick. Dean showed me how foolish all this was. 'Face the truth, Ken,' he told me. 'You are weak. All of us are. Come to terms with it.' But then he pointed out I didn't have to stay this way, that God was certainly not weak. Dean has helped me understand that if I have the Spirit of God within me, then His strength would replace my weakness...

When the dream of our heart is one that God has planted there, a strange happiness flows into us. At that moment, the spiritual resources of the universe are released to help us.

The only time I ever find my dealings with God less than clear-cut is when I'm not being honest with Him. The fuzziness is always on my side, not His.

My father always told us that if we will let God, He can use even our disappointments, even our annoyances to bring us a blessing. There's a practical way to start the process too: by thanking Him for whatever happens, no matter how disagreeable it seems.

I still don't understand anything- exept that somehow I know that You are love. And that in my heart has been so great a love for Christy as I did not know could exist on this earth. You, God, must be responsible. You must have put it there. So what do I do with it now?

When you heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people - especially the ripsnorting sinners - so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results.

Clean up a pigsty," she commented one evening, "and if the creatures in it still have pig-minds and pig-desires, soon it will be the same old pigsty again.

The house, it's already been a-settin' here for a hundred years. It'll be right here tomorrow. It's today I must be livin'.

The search for God begins at the point of need.

Have you ever thought that the only ugly things in this Cove are man's fault, while the beautiful things are God's work? Look at those mountains.

Living in the middle of beauty like this, we've no call to have puny ideas about God. Why do you suppose His world is so fancy-fine, so full of wonderment if He doesn't want everything to be good and perfect and right and healthy? But we can spoil His good work. When we mess things up, then we shouldn't blame Him and try to make ourselves feel better by contending that it's what He wanted.

So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It's quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you've come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about.

Some of what I wrote bordered on blasphemy....If there was a God, He would have to be truth. And in that case, candor--however impertinent--would be more pleasing to Him than posturing.