Words pointing…
Pain doesn’t tell you when you ought to stop. Pain is the little voice in your head that tries to hold you back because it knows if you continue, you will change. Don’t let it stop you from being who you can be. Exhaustion tells you when you ought to stop. You only reach your limit when you can go no further.
…some people live in such a way that it is impossible to have any kind of happiness in their home, but then they go to church and sing songs and pray ‘in the spirit,’ hoping that God will somehow give them an infusion of joy to make it through the day. They are looking for some kind of heavenly transfusion that will bypass the misery of their daily lives and give them joy. But God’s desire is to transform their misery, not to bypass it.
One winter evening, when the innovative engineer R. Buckminster Fuller was drinking tea by the fireplace of Prof. Hugh Kenner, three-year-old Lisa Kenner prolonged her bedtime farewell with the question: “Bucky, why is the fire hot?” Kenner writes: Some instinct told Lisa he was the man to ask. His answer, as he took her on his lap, began, like most of his answers, some distance away from the question. “You remember, darling, when the tree was growing in the sunlight?” On arms like upgroping branches, his hands became clusters of leaves as he described their collecting the sunlight, processing its energies into sugars, drawing them down into a stocky trunk. “Then the men cut it down. and and sawed it into logs. And what you see now”—he pointed to the crackling hearth—“is the sunlight, unwinding from the log.”
I need to put up with two or three caterpillars
if I want to get to know the butterflies.
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
God comes to us disguised as our life.
I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are, but does not leave us where it found us.
There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change.
Winter preserves and strengthens a tree. Rather than expending its strength on the exterior surface, its sap is forced deeper and deeper into its interior depth. In winter a tougher, more resilient life is firmly established. Winter is necessary for the tree to survive and flourish.
Instantly you see the application. So often we hide our true condition with the surface virtues of pious activity, but once the leaves of our frantic pace drop away, the power of a wintry spirituality can have effect.
To the outward eye everything looks barren and unsightly. Our many defects, flaws, weaknesses, and imperfections stand out in bold relief. But only the outward virtues have collapsed; the principle of virtue is actually being strengthened. The soul is venturing forth into the interior. Real, solid, enduring virtues begin to develop deep within. Pure love is being birthed.
When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.
The seasons move in silence through the changing year. Spring does not come from winter; it comes from the silence from which winter came.
Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.