True Christian love (1)

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I’m reblogging from Wonder and Beauty for the next couple of days . . .

Sr. Dorcee, beloved's avatarWonder and Beauty

I’m sure we would all agree that true Christian love is the most beautiful and wonderful thing to be seen.  I would like to post a few excerpts (in the next few posts) from The Midnight Bride by Richard Wurmbrand which illustrate this so well.

Some of you may find this unbelievable.  I would, except that I had a taste of this love in a much smaller way a number of years ago.  I was teaching sixth grade at the time, and one of my students had a detention again (!).  I felt inspired to do his detention for him, not having any idea of how that would impact him, but hoping he would somehow be touched by my willingness to love him in this way.  I still don’t know what effect it had, but that is in God’s hands.

In his book Dust on the Road, Nikiforov-Volgin, a…

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The action of the Sun

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“I always found it difficult to remain motionless and contemplate God [in the Blessed Sacrament] in the silent dry spells of my faith. Despite this, I know that one must expose the soul to the action of the Sun and not fear that one is wasting time in the chapel, even when one feels nothing. One must give the Sun time to achieve its bronzing effect. It requires a little patience.”  (King Baudouin of Belgium)

Each to his calling

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Everyone should follow his calling and carry out his work according to his God-given gifts and capacities.  The same breath is blown into flute, cornet and bagpipe, but different music is produced according to the different instruments.  In the same way the one Spirit works in us, God’s children but different results are produced, and God is glorified through them according to each one’s temperaments and personality.  (Sadhu Sundar Singh)

Let Him have you

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

From a letter from Helen Roseveare to a struggling paraplegic friend:

“Going back to your letter-you have said, ‘It’s one thing not to know His purposes for my life, but it’s another matter not to know what He wants of me.’ No, no! That is the next step in the darkness.  We do not have to know anything except that He is El-Shaddai–He is the great Almighty Creator God who loves me and loves you, and in some amazing way, who has chosen us to be part of His program.  He does NOT have to explain to us how or when or in what way. Let Him have YOU, all of you, all your thought processes, all your desperate desire to understand, to know the meaning of this whole protracted process. Stop hankering to know what He is not choosing to explain to you yet.Oh,how relatively easy to write that, but how infinitely harder to put it into practice. Give over to Him the longing for the joy and peace of the past. Just let Him be the ALL for you in the present.”

To Satisfy the Soul

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In comparison with this big world, the human heart is only a small thing.  Though the world is so large, it is utterly unable to satisfy this tiny heart.  Man’s ever-growing soul and its capacities can only be satisfied in the infinite God.  As water is restless until it reaches its level, so the soul has not peace until it rests in God.   (Sadhu Sundar Singh)

The right kind of sympathy

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Matthew 26.38 Then he said to them, ‘My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.”

“Mary Mozley of Central Africa wrote in a letter: “Somebody suggested this thought to me, and it came home to me the other day in reading about Christ in Gethsemane–that the way to show true sympathy is not to pity, but to stand by and strengthen the sufferer to do God’s will.  And in Gethsemane, when Christ turned to the three for sympathy, it was with the words, ‘Watch with Me.’ ‘Stand by Me.’  He asked for no pity, but for the strengthening which might seem a feeble help, just that they might let their presence and prayer tell there for Him, to strengthen Him to do the will of God.”

“The Lord help each one of us to ‘stand by’ one another with just this kind of bracing sympathy.”

(Amy Carmichael)