Quotes from Mike Mason

It is easier to diminish God than it is to enlarge one's heart.

To keep a vow, means not to keep from breaking it, but rather to devote the rest of one's life to discovering what the vow means, and to be willing to change and to grow accordingly.

Love is an earthquake that relocates the center of the universe.

And as Dad said to me, 'You can't always stop people from being mean. But you can stop them from making you mean.

Pure suffering has a consciousness, a tongue, a heart all its own and even the memory of it is but a pale unreality when compared with the actual experience.

True worship has less to do with offering sacrifices than with being a sacrifice ourselves.

And as Dad said to me, 'You can't always stop people from being mean. But you can stop them from making you mean.

And so must learn to love with our mouths and voices, as well as with our eyes, flesh, heart, brains, and with everything we have, right down to our toenails. There is not anything about us that cannot love, and that is not called to love, and that is not destined to be turned, conformed, and reduced to pure love. It ...is the priceless deposit left by the burning away of selfishness.

Theology, it turns out, is Satan's favorite game.

so the best marriages and the deepest relationships with God grow out of the startling discovery that there is nothing one can do to earn love, and even more startling, that there is also nothing one can do to unlearn it, or to keep oneself from being loved. This is a religious awakening that is utterly different from any other religious experience, no matter how profoundly spiritual it may seem.

Happy people have just as much pain as anyone else, in some cases more. It could even be argued that the happy feel pain more acutely than the unhappy, whose feelings are relatively numb. The real difference in happy people is that they're not trapped by their pain. Rather than settling inside a happy soul, pain moves through it as through a channel, and that channel is joy. Joy keeps pain moving.

Real love is always fated. It has been arranged before time. It is the most meticulously prepared of coincidences. And fate, of course, is simply a secular term for the will of God, and coincidence for His grace.

What is such a believer, whose very life depends upon the daily bread of the living Word of God, supposed to do when God is silent?

There is no trick of a magician or spell of a witch doctor, no drug or mesmerism or bribery or torture or coercion that can compare in power with the force for change unleashed in the human breast through the touch of love.

Love coaxes and even hood-winks us into the making of a decision so radical that if left to our own devices we would never have entertained it for a moment.

As long as the self is consumed in the struggle to make itself lovely, it cannot love. First it must come to the end of its own resources, for the power to love derives purely and solely from the knowledge that one is already loved in return.

If God accepts us at all, He accepts us wholeheartedly, and He covers us completely with the spotless robe of righteousness. This robe of divine acceptance does not come in gray, but only in dazzling white, and one either has the robe or not. One is either righteous or wicked. And anyone who is wicked can have that status quickly amended by a trip to the cross.

The direction of joy isn't always up. Often to be joyful we must go down - down through the noise of racing thoughts, down through swirling chaos of circumstances, down through the deceptive appearances of life, down into the still waters and green pastures of the heart's core.

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El verdadero amor siempre es predestinado. El mismo fue ordenado desde antes de la creación del tiempo. Entre las coincidencias, es la que más preparación ha tenido. Y el destino, por supuesto, no es otra cosa que un término secular para la voluntad de Dios, y coincidencia de su gracia.

Of course, it is almost always the case that the couple has much more in common than they may suppose. But marriage seems to specialize, at times, in radically de-emphasizing the similarities between the partners and wildly exaggerating the points of difference.

The taking of vows is an act of faith. If people were faithful by nature, vows would not be necessary; their yes would be yes and their no would be no. But it is because people are not inherently faithful nor honest nor loving that they must stand up and declare they will be.

With trust, everything is possible.

hate makes you a prisoner, not just of them but of yourself.