Turn it as thou wilt, thou must give thyself to suffer what is appointed thee. But if we did that, God would bear us up at all times in all our sorrows and troubles and God would lay His shoulder under our burdens, and help us to bear them. For if, with a cheerful courage, we submitted ourselves to God, no suffering would be unbearable.
There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil. Job 1:1 (KJV)
Jennifer Van Allen www.theprodigalpig.com www.faithincounseling.org
Prodigal: Me, too. I am glad we could talk though.
This is from the book Absolute Surrender by Andrew Murray
Brother, are you clothed with humility? Ask your daily life. Ask Jesus. Ask your friends. Ask the world. And begin to praise God that there is opened up to you in Jesus a heavenly humility of which you have hardly known, and through which a heavenly blessedness you possible have never yet tasted can come in to you.
Then they reviled him, and said, Thou art his disciple; but we are Moses’ disciples. John 9:28 (KJV)
Prodigal: He would argue with a fence post, then pull up the post and argue with the hole.
Me: Lord have mercy, let’s pray for him then.
This is from the book No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton
A selfish love seldom respects the rights of the beloved to be an autonomous person. Far from respecting the true being of another and granting his personality room to grow and expand in its own original way, this love seeks to keep him in subjection to ourselves. It insists that he conform himself to us, and it works in every possible way to make him do so. A selfish love withers and dies unless it is sustained by the attention of the beloved. When we love thus, our friends exist only in order that we may love them. In loving them we seek to make pets of them, to keep them tame. Such love fears nothing more than the escape of the beloved. It requires his subjection because that is necessary for the nourishment of our own affections.
Selfish love often appears to be unselfish, because it is willing to make any concession to the beloved in order to keep him prisoner. But it is supreme selfishness to buy what is best in a person, his liberty, his integrity, his own autonomous dignity as a person, at the price of far lesser goods. Such selfishness is all the more abominable when it takes a complacent pleasure in its concessions, deluded that they are all acts of selfless charity.
A love, therefore, that is selfless, that honestly seeks the truth, does not make unlimited concessions to the beloved.
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Matthew 13:12 (KJV)
Me: As we start today, don’t forget. Don’t pray for a light load, pray for a strong back.
Prodigal: Yes, Lord help me!
This is from E.B. Pusey
This, then, is of faith, that everything, the very least, or what seems to us great, every change of the seasons, everything which touches us in mind, body, or estate, whether brought about through this outward senseless nature, or by the will of man, good or bad, is overruled to each of us by the all-holy and all-loving will of God. Whatever befalls us, however it befalls us, we must receive as the will of God. If it befalls us through man’s negligence, or ill-will, or anger, still it is, in every the least circumstance, to us the will of God. For if the least thing could happen to us without God’s permission, it would be something out of God’s control. God’s providence or His love would not be what they are. Almighty God Himself would not be the same God; not the God whom we believe, adore, and love.
Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come. Psalm 71:18 (KJV)
