#ace

When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He’s like Bill Clinton in that he feels everyone’s pain. If Rick thinks somebody is lonely, he can’t sleep at night. He wants us all to live with each other and play nice so he can get some rest. Tortured soul. ↗

— Donald Miller

#community #donald-miller #peace #faith

Grace is the first and last moving cause of salvation; and faith, essential as it is, is only an important part of the machinery which grace employs. We are saved 'through faith,' but salvation is 'by grace'. ↗

— Charles H. Spurgeon

#grace #jesus #faith

That's all my grandfather was guilty of, fear, faith in his words, but that was a high crime in her eyes. That's all Jack was guilty of that day, but I've lived with him a good while and I believe I understand him. Sometimes it might take an afternoon or evening of being here in this kitchen alone, thinking, but I can usually come to see his reasons through his ways. And half the job of finding peace is finding understanding. Don't you believe it to be so? ↗

— Kaye Gibbons

#guilt #peace #understanding #faith

Grace works ahead of us to draw us toward faith, to begin its work in us. Even the first fragile intuition of conviction of sin, the first intimation of our need of God, is the work of preparing, prevening grace, which draws us gradually toward wishing to please God. Grace is working quietly at the point of our desiring, bringing us in time to despair over our own unrighteousness, challenging our perverse dispositions, so that our distorted wills cease gradually to resist the gift of God. ↗

— Thomas C. Oden

#christianity #conviction #god #grace #prevenient-grace

Grace makes us inwardly RIGHT so we walk outwardly UPRIGHT ↗

— John Paul Warren

#christian #church #faith #gospel #grace

Make rules and follow rules as needed, but don't focus on riles. Focus on faith. Focus on grace. Focus on Jesus. ↗

— Judah Smith

#grace #jesus #rules #faith

Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. ↗

— Maya Angelou

#break #peace #rest #vacation #work

You're my sister," he said finally. "My sister, my blood, my family. I should want to protect you"- he laughed soundlessly and without any humor- "to protect you from the sort of boys who want to do with you exactly what I want to do. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#mortal-instruments #family

You know how the bonds of family are, my lady... They cling as tightly as vines. And sometimes, like vines, they cling tightly enough to kill. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#seelie-court #family

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#contraception #family-planning #family