grace

I doubt that anyone has a Damascus moment after experiencing discrimination. Most people seem to have shining moments of change after experiencing grace.

You can't win the race without God's grace

True class can never receive the highest grade..for its grade is endless

Pull himself together? This was a man who looked permanently cemented together.

There is no shame here. The places where we still fear are simply the places we have yet to fully receive God__ love. Only by his grace and in his love can we let our fear go. Let go and receive. Receive his dreams. Receive his love. It is an exchange of fear for desire. It is an exchange of death for life. There is no fear in love. And I can tell you this with certainty: God does not want you to live in fear. And he does want you to live. Don__ be afraid. Just believe.

Sometimes we go along, thinking"Ah, this is it - this is what true peace feels like_" Then, in a moment of grace, something shifts in our hearts, and in awestruck wonder, we whisper, "oh my, I just didn't know there could more...

Loyal companions are an unequaled grace, stanching fear before it bleeds you numb, a reliable antidote for creeping despair.

Faith itself is an act of human willing enabled and disciplined by grace.

God spoke through the prophet Isaiah and said in Isaiah 54:4-10 (NLT)4 __ear not; you will no longer live in shame. Don__ be afraid; there is no more disgrace for you.You will no longer remember the shame of your youth and the sorrows of widowhood.5 For your Creator will be your husband; the Lord of Heaven__ Armies is his name!He is your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, the God of all the earth.6 For the Lord has called you back from your grief_ as though you were a young wife abandoned by her husband,_ says your God.7 __or a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great compassion I will take you back.8 In a burst of anger I turned my face away for a little while. But with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,_ says the Lord, your Redeemer.9 __ust as I swore in the time of Noah that I would never again let a flood cover the earth,so now I swear that I will never again be angry and punish you.10 For the mountains may move and the hills disappear,but even then my faithful love for you will remain. My covenant of blessing will never be broken,_ says the Lord, who has mercy on you.

Such arguments remind me of a scene from Woody Allen's movie Manhattan, where a group of people is talking about sex at a cocktail party and one woman says that her doctor told her she had been having the wrong kind of orgasm. Woody Allen's character responds by saying, __id you have the wrong kind? Really? I've never had the wrong kind. Never, ever. My worst one was right on the money._ Grace works the same way. It is what it is and it's always right on the money. You can call it what you like, categorize it, vivisect it, qualify, quantify, or dismiss it, and none of it will make grace anything other than precisely what grace is: audacious, unwarranted, and unlimited.

No matter how many good deeds we preform, they aren__ the ticket to earning God__ favor. God graces us in spite of what we do in this life, not because of.

To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

Heaven is the only place where prayers are not made.

Every story of conversion is a story of blessed defeat.

Reading the scriptures through the lenses of the Law you see God as unapproachable, through the lenses of Grace you see the outstretched arms of Jesus saying "come".

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful graces of God.

Although her eyes are neither golden nor heavenly blue, Terri Stambaugh has the vision of an angel, for she sees through you and knows your truest heart, but loves you anyway, in spite of all the ways that you have fallen from a state of grace.

Typically, images or paintings are designated as anamorphic when, in order for the image to appear, a particular line of sight must be adopted. The image only shows up when approached from the angle dictated to the viewer by the image's own set of conditions. In this sense, the viewer must 're-form' their perspective to match the perspective demanded by the image. We are not free to approach the image as we wish; the image is free to assign us a perspective proper to itself... Anamorphosis, then, describes the freedom of the phenomenon to give itself as it wishes and it measures the extent to which this freedom turns the tables on the one to whom it appears. To receive a phenomenon as it wishes to give itself is to yield control and suspend our own timetables and preconditions in order to be faithful to the conditions set by what gives itself.