Some quotes...

I'm not writing this particular post in the sense that it will not contain any of my original thoughts. All that comprises this post comes from a book called Patches of Godlight, the journal of a fictional pastor. The journal is made up of quotes from the likes of C.S. Lewis, Wordsworth, Martin Luther King Jr., John Wesley, and many other famous authors, theologians, etc. I may come back to some of these quotes in some later writings, but for now I want to let them stand as what they are. I won't add any interpretations or relate them to any personal anecdotes. They will serve only to convey the meanings intended by their authors and the God who ordered their thoughts. I hope you find them insightful and enjoyable. There will probably be more to come...

We -- or at least I -- shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best, our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable, but we shall not have found Him so, not have "tasted and seen." Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are "patches of godlight" in the woods of experience. -C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

"The Bible without the Holy Spirit is a sundial by moonlight." -Dwight L. Moody

"I have been tortured with longing to believe... and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way." -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Let the Stable Still Astonish

Let the stable still astonish:

Straw-dirt floor, dull eyes,

Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;

Crumbling, crooked walls;

No bed to carry that pain,

And then, the child,

Rag-wrapped, laid to cry

In a trough.

Who would have chosen this?

Who would have said: "Yes,

Let the God of all the heavens and earth

Be born here, in this place"?

Who but the same God

Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms of our hearts

And says, "Yes,

Let the God of Heaven and Earth

Be born here --

In this place."

--Leslie Leyland Fields

"Were there no God, we would be in this glorious world with grateful hearts, and no one to thank." -Christina Rossetti

"It is not a question of our equipment but of our poverty, not of what we bring with us, but of what God puts into us." -Oswald Chambers