True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” Buechner’s definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world; it begins, wisely,...
Life, with its achievements and challenges, its joys and sorrows, gifts us with many opportunities to grow and serve. We serve when we willingly share the wisdom we have gleaned from our life experiences. The spirit of our life is made visible in the spirit of our...
Let the future be a joy and not a burden… Know the past is a foundation and not an anchor… Hold the present in steady hands like ordinary clay about to become a collector’s item! And… Go with God!
Happiness turns up more or less where you expect it to—a good marriage, a rewarding job, a pleasant vacation. Joy, on the other hand, is as notoriously unpredictable as the one who bequeaths it.
The devil is most happy when he can snatch from a servant of God true joy of the Spirit. He carries dust with him to throw into the smallest chinks of conscience and thus soil one’s mental candor and purity of life. But if joy of the Spirit fills the heart, the...
When I think of God, my heart is so filled with joy that the notes fly off as from a spindle.
Find joy in everything that leads to God.
Joy is nothing else than the awareness of our being fulfilled in our true being, in our personal center.
Sometimes joy is compounded of many elements: a touch of sadness, a whimper of pain, a harsh word tenderly held until all its arrogance dies, the casting of the eye into the face that understands, the clasp of a hand that holds, then releases, a murmur of tenderness...
Sometimes those who have been in the church for a long time can adopt a joyless spirit… These people…become blind to the good things around them. …Instead, they obsess over bad things and want everyone else to…obsess with them. This kind of complaining, joyless spirit...