Quotes About Struggle

If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!

Often a work of God comes with two edges, great joy and great pain, and in that matter-of-fact response Mary embraced both. She was the first person to accept Jesus on His own terms, regardless of the personal cost.

AS ANDREW GREELEY SAID, If one wishes to eliminate uncertainty, tension, confusion and disorder from one's life, there is no point  in getting mixed up either with Yahweh or with Jesus of Nazareth.7-9 I grew up expecting that a relationship with God would bring order, certainty, and a calm rationality to life. Instead, I have discovered that living in faith involves much dynamic tension.

The question {WHY}, though, never goes away-- not for me, not for anybody. We keep groping toward light while living in darkness.

History is a test of faith, and the correct response to that test is persistent prayer.

The temptation that Jesus resisted in the wildreness [a crown without a cross; worldly glory], many of us, His followers, still long for.

Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?

My publisher conducted a website poll, and of the 678 respondents only 23 felt satisfied with the time they were spending in prayer. That

The kingdom of suffering is a democracy, and we all stand in it or alongside it with nothing but our naked humanity.

Be careful," warned Nietzsche, "lest in fighting the dragon you become the dragon.

27The man asked him, "What is your name?" "Jacob," he answered. 28Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,[149] because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome." 29Jacob said, "Please tell me your name." But he replied, "Why do you ask my name?" Then he blessed him there.

The worst moment for the atheist is

Be careful," warned Nietzsche, "lest in fighting the dragon you become the dragon." I

positioned myself. I once described the people I tend to hear from as "borderlanders," those caught in a no-person's-land between faith and disbelief. Some approach the church cautiously, attracted to Jesus but turned off by his followers. Some have fled the church due to bad experiences, yet still yearn for the consolation they felt there. I've spent time in the borderlands myself and want to honor those wandering on the edges, the misfits.

La Biblia no hace ninguna promesa color rosa acerca de vivir en una primavera eterna. Lo que hace es señalar hacia la fe que nos ayuda a prepararnos para las estaciones de sequía. Vendrán duros inviernos, seguidos por veranos ardientes. No obstante, si las raíces de la fe adquieren la suficiente profundidad para llegar hasta donde se halla el Agua Viva, podremos sobrevivir a los tiempos de sequía y florecer en los tiempos de abundancia.

The committee has again been reminded that every human effort is flawed

It is difficult, if not impossible, to communicate the message of grace from the corridors of power.

Fear is the universal primal response to suffering. And yet beyond doubt it is also the single greatest "enemy of recovery.

In a sense, Job must replay the original test of the garden of Eden, with the bar raised higher. Living in paradise, Adam and Eve faced a best-case scenario for trusting God, who asked so little of them and showered down blessings. In a living hell, Job faces the worst-case scenario: God asks so much, while curses rain down on him.

The church of my own childhood, as well as that of my present and my future, comprises deeply flawed human beings struggling toward an unattainable ideal.

There's something unique about having only God to lean on in times of trial.

Ungrace plays like the background static of life for families, nations, and institutions. It is, sadly, our natural human state.

Despite a hundred sermons on forgiveness, we do not forgive easily, nor find ourselves easily forgiven.

Forgiveness, we discover, is always harder than the sermons make it out to be