discipleship

Relationships we complain about nevertheless keep us connected to life.

With a more expansive stretch, there__ a better chance that I__l be around at the precise, random moment when one of my nephews drops his guard and solicits my advice about something private. Or when one of my nieces will need someone other than her parents to tell her that she__ smart and beautiful.

She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional.

The affair made men feel larger than life.

It's not easy being a missionary, even with the key to the cosmos in your hand.

Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate.

Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?

The usefulness of a man or woman of God relies on the ability to remain distinct.

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out air-quality. He knew it already. It was I who did. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the day all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize that fact was to knock it down.

God trains His soldiers, not in tents of ease and luxury, but by turning them out and using them to forced marches and hard service. He makes them ford through streams, and swim through rivers, and climb mountains, and walk many a long mile with heavy knapsacks of sorrow on their backs.

What we are taught to seek or shun in prayer, we should equally pursue or avoid in action. Very earnestly, therefore, should we avoid temptation, seeking to walk so guardedly in the path of obedience, that we may never tempt the devil to tempt us.

the heart of a prophet is not his own to bestow.

Peace between good and evil is an impossibility; the very pretence of it would, in fact, be the triumph of the powers of darkness.

Students are taught how to do things, but many are not forced to reflect on why they should do them or what we are here for.

The author attributes part of the Carter-Reagan divide to their respective attitudes toward the city from which they governed. Carter was deeply suspicious of its coziness. Reagan intended to enjoy his temporary home even while delivering it from its reigning ideology.

Spontaneities offer one kind of pleasure and taste of sanctity, repetitions another equally pleasurable and holy.

Down deep in His innermost soul Christ carried an inexhaustible treasury of refined and heavenly joy.

Peace is the opposite of dreaming. It__ built slowly and surely through brutal compromises and tiny victories that you don__ even see. It__ a messy business, bringing peace into the world.