Personal, spiritual symmetry emerges only from the shaping of prolonged obedience. Twigs are bent, not snapped into shape.
Perfect love is perfectly patient.
The authority of example and considerations of character, unlike pudding, are not whipped up in an instant.
Our journey is demanding enough that the need for reassurance as well as reminders is constant.
Blessed is he who will not be offended.
Those few members who desert the cause are abandoning an oasis to search for water in the desert.
Our little pebble of poor performance helps to start, or to sustain, an avalanche.
God’s anger is kindled not because we have harmed him but because we have harmed ourselves.
Our goals should stretch us bit by bit. So often when we think we have encountered a ceiling, it is really a psychological or experiential barrier that we have built ourselves. We built it and we can remove it.
Without making a fetish of goal setting, and without letting “lists” of tasks we desire to do dominate us, some recording of goals is wise not only for the self-reminder these constitute, but also for the satisfaction of crossing things off.
It is extremely important for you to believe in yourselves not only for what you are now but for what you have the power to become. Trust in the Lord as He leads you along. He has things for you to do that you won’t know about now but that will unfold later. If you stay close to Him, You will have some great adventures. You will live in a time where instead of sometimes being fulfilled, many of them will actually be fulfilled. The Lord will unfold your future bit by bit.
The issue for us is trusting God enough to trust also His timing. If we can truly believe He has our welfare at heart, may we not let His plans unfold as He thinks best? The same is true with the second coming and with all those matters wherein our faith needs to include faith in the Lord’s timing for us personally, not just in His overall plans and purposes.
We were never promised precision in this life... With the gift of agency to mankind, life cannot possibly present a perfectly tidy picture. The ambiguities of circumstances are partly, if not largely, the cumulative result of our varied use of our moral agency, but also of the structure of life itself.
The day will come, brothers and sisters, when we will have other books of scripture which will emerge to accompany the Holy Bible and the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. Presently you and I carry our scriptures around in a “quad”; the day will come when you’ll need a little red wagon.
As George MacDonald wisely wrote, “The one principle of hell is, I am my own!” 4 Fierce pride usually protects this wrong perception.
Patience is a willingness, in a sense, to watch the unfolding purposes of God with a sense of wonder and awe, rather than pacing up and down within the cell of our circumstance.
We could not learn love in the abstract any more than we could learn patience and the other cardinal virtues. Just as we cannot know the “fellowship of his sufferings” without suffering, we also come to know real fellowship with our fellowmen only by serving them.
Giving up on God and on oneself constitutes simultaneous surrender to the natural man.
While weak hope leaves us at the mercy of our moods and events, ‘brightness of hope’ produces illuminated individuals. Their luminosity is seen, and things are also seen by it!
He did not let yesterday hold tomorrow hostage. There was a willingness on his part to forget. Forgetting facilitates the generosity that springs from Christlike charity.
It follows, then, that you and I cannot really expect to glide through life, coolly air-conditioned, while naively petitioning: “Lord, give me experience but not grief, a deeper appreciation of happiness but not deeper sorrow, joy in comfort but not in pain, more capacity to overcome but not more opposition; and please do not let me ever feel perplexed while on thine errand. Then let me come quickly and dwell with thee and fully share thy joy.