“The reason God became flesh was so that we might know him; correspondingly, God did not create marriage just to give us a pleasant means of repopulating the world and providing a steady societal institution for the benefit of humanity. He planted marriage among humans as yet another signpost pointing to his own eternal, spiritual existence.”
-Gary Thomas, “Sacred Marriage.”
“Marriage is a cross-cultural relationship.”
“Scripture is like a marriage counselor with regard to our relationship with God.”
God meets us and equips us.
God speaks your heart language.
“I’m [like] the disciples; they get it and blow it, they get it and blow it.”
A woman holds her tongue knowing silence will speak for her.
- from the song “Remind Me”
Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper even than reality.
-G.K. Chesterton
Obsessions with self-preservation
Faded when I threw my fear away
It’s not a thing you can imagine
You either lose your fear
Or spend your life with one foot in the grave
Is God the last romantic?
-”Spark” (OTR)
To possess true beauty, we must be willing to suffer. [..] Women who are stunningly beautiful are women who had had their hearts enlarged by suffering. By saying, “Yes” when the world says, “No.” By paying the high price of loving truly and honestly without demanding that they be loved in return. And by refusing to numb their pain in a myriad of ways available. They have come to know that when everyone and everything has left them, God is there.
-from the book Captivating
All the signs of life aren’t clear and straight and always right; our ideas of perfect are so imperfect.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I gotten this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call something crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.
– C.S. Lewis
God wills that we should push on into His presence and live our whole life there. — A. W. Tozer
Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God. (1 Corinthians 10:31)
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
-C.S. Lewis
We do not deal much in fact when we are contemplating ourselves.
-Mark Twain
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave, it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea! – incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks in the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who “didn’t know what fear was,” we ought always to add the flea – and put him at the head of the procession.
–Mark Twain