christian-fiction

Have faith. Ye've so much for everyone else. Why not save some for yerself once in a while?

I wish I could have healed your misery, quenched your sorrow.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happy hour, the long weekend, the all-inclusive island resort, the sunny beach vacation. Happiness is somewhere else, someplace with boat drinks, some secret, distant state of bliss which if they were given would bore them in minutes.

Though the heart may be cracked wide, pain can still seep in.

Where faith costs nothing, faith loses respect, even to those who possess it.

I say __llusion_ of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing.

As a rule, Americans are big on that word __hoice_ and some souls can be captured simply by dangling before the creature a continual, lifelong supply of things from which to choose.

In general, it__ not too hard to corrupt an American, mostly a matter of supply to their demand. Supply should be variegated to encourage the Illusion of Choice. Other than that they__e looking for numbness, so be ready to sedate. Drugs, booze, television, shopping, etc_

Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins.

They all want to be happy. They all think they should be happy. And they__e quick to trot out their most cherished document and point to where they were promised __ife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness._ But you__l find that though they all parrot that little phrase, they think none too hard about that word __ursuit_. To follow, to chase, to inquire, to hunt, to seek. To track in order to overtake and capture. This they don__ do. Instead, having been offered a promise of happiness, they progress to a feeling of entitlement for happiness, then make the leap that happiness should, therefore, be easily won, automatic. There__ too much wrong in there to even scratch at that!

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would__e worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would__e then better lead them on to happiness.

Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.

It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn__ mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude.

Gratitude, not guilt, as motivation is always His starting point, thus guilt as a motivation leads nowhere.

That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary__ greatest curatives __ratitude.

I shouldn__ need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn__ think to stop it?

. ."Isn't Chief worried about the Dan Rather-James Brady syndrome? Getting the news first -- if it's incorrect? And if that wasn't enough, then in 2004, Rather turned around and did it again when he didn't confirm President George Bush's military records and broadcast a bogus story about President Bush." -- excerpt from "Love Thy Neighbor" ©2012. by Diane Moore