What we don’t have now we don’t need now. Possibly His very withholding is in order that the boy may learn, at this crucial juncture in his life, to turn to God in prayer for a deeply felt need.
This is the context in which the story must be understood – as one incident in human history, an incident in certain ways and to certain people important, but only one incident. God is the God of human history, and He is at work continuously, mysteriously, accomplishing His eternal purposes in us, through us, for us, and in spite of us.
But God has set no traps for us. Quite the contrary. He has summoned us to the only true and full freedom.
If He is God, He is still in charge.
Jim practiced what he preached when he wrote in his diary: ‘Wherever you are, be all here. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.
The Indians had become people to me – they were no longer my “field.” While I had once declared them to be my equals, I now regarded myself as theirs. Instead of saying, “Oh, you are as good as I – let me help you,” I now said, “I am as poor as you. God help us all.
A few clear pronouncements on one side and a few honest questions on the other had, in a matter of minutes, shown me that life was not going to be as simple, ever again, as I had thought.
You yourself will be given light in exchange for pouring yourself out for the hungry; you yourself will get guidance, the satisfaction of your longings, and strength, when you “pour yourself out,” when you make the satisfaction of somebody else’s desire your own concern;.
Matters of the heart still can never put us beyond His love and redemption.
If the yearning went away, what would we have to offer up to the Lord? Aren’t they given to us to offer? It is the control of passion, not it’s eradication, that is needed.
I wonder if she allowed the man to see her eagerness and scared him? Possibly her failure to wait quietly caused him to “curtail the friendship”.
If he had loved her he would have pursued her.
A woman ought to be honest with a man who shows interest in her.
We are not adrift in chaos. To me that is the most fortifying, the most stabilizing, the most peace-giving thing that I know about anything in the universe. Every time that things have seemingly fallen apart in my life, I have gone back to those things that do not change. Nothing in the universe can ever change those facts. He loves me. I am not at the mercy of chance.
God is God. If He is God, He is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere but in His will, and that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what He is up to.
If I am to love the Lord my God with all my mind, there will not be room in it for carnality, for pride, for anxiety, for the love of myself. How can the mind be filled with the love of the Lord and have space left over for things like that?
Whatever is in the cup that God is offering to me, whether it be pain and sorrow and suffering and grief along with the many more joys, I’m willing to take it because I trust Him.
It’s only in the cross that we can begin to harmonize this seeming contradiction between suffering and love.
To love means to open ourselves to suffering. Shall we shut our doors to love, then and ‘be safe’?” That’s the only alternative, really. But locking ourselves up and never facing another person won’t fix what’s really going on in our souls.
Thanksgiving is a spiritual exercise, necessary to the building of a healthy soul. It takes us out of the stuffiness of ourselves into the fresh breeze and sunlight of the will of God.