In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others. from Letters and Papers from...
The one who is wise will see their life as more like a reservoir than a canal. The canal simultaneously pours out what it receives; the reservoir retains the water till it is filled, then discharges the overflow without loss to itself. . . . Today there are many in...
The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter. Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad, the pure from the impure. God is big enough to...
And if you don't think you have anything to be grateful for, keep looking. Because you don't just receive optimism. You can't wait for things to be great and then be grateful for that. You've got to behave in a way that promotes that.
To err on the side of grace is no error at all. Grace is a gift, not an award. And once received, it is to be passed along unconditionally, not selectively.
People who know God well—mystics, hermits, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator. God is never found as an abusive father or a tyrannical mother; God is always a lover greater than we dared hope for. How different from the “account...
In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is...
I am certain in my heart that all that I am, I have received from God.
The church is, above all, a place to receive grace: it brings forgiven people together with the aim of equipping us to dispense grace to others. from Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?
We cannot force someone to hear a message they are not ready to receive, but we must never underestimate the power of planting a seed.