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If you begin to live life looking for
the God that is
all around you,
every moment becomes a prayer.
Frank Bianco
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God
- God 2 - God 3 - God 5
- God 6
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God has spoken very boldly about his desire to be a
presence in our lives.
If I
want to heal the ache and loneliness in my own life, one of the things
I
need to do is get away, alone with God. . . . In the silence God will
speak
to you most powerfully. Too
often his words to us get muffled, lost, or
covered by the crowd of many
noises both inside and outside of us.
We must have a quiet heart in order to hear God's distinctive
message to us.
Tim Hansel |
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God does not want us to abandon our dreams, but will
lovingly work with us to
refine our unrealistic dreams,
to restore our broken dreams, to realize
our delayed dreams,
and to redesign our shattered dreams so both
His
purposes and our dreams can be fulfilled.
Ken Abraham |
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If you want a television, you go out
and work for it
and you buy it.
If you want
to learn about Aztec
pottery, you take a course.
But the relationship with God
requires
the active and passionate
participation
of you, yourself. You
have
to risk it.
You have to
abandon yourself to it.
You
have to leap into the fire. Nobody
will do it for you; nobody can do it for you.
Andrew Harvey
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I believe in the absolute oneness of God and
therefore of humanity.
What
though we have many bodies? We
have but one soul. . . . I know
God is neither in heaven nor down below,
but in everyone.
Mohandas K. Gandhi |
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In seeking a more meaningful life, you might choose
to pull the plug
on technology, slow down, and listen to life.
Pick blackberries.
Watch it snow—really watch it.
Lie on the grass and look at clouds.
Write a letter to a friend who expects one only at Christmas.
Look closely at the words of a hymn.
Thumb through a photo album.
Notice
the expression on your child’s face as she draws.
Write a poem.
But such actions begin
much deeper: with humbling ourselves in
childlike faith before Him; in
what He knows, not what we know;
in trusting that, just as nobody knows
what’s best for a boat like
the people who made it, so does our Maker
know what’s best for those He made.
Bob Welch |
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God knows change can make your life richer.
Live for today
but hold your hands open to tomorrow.
Anticipate the future
and its changes with joy.
There is a seed of God’s love
in every event, every circumstance,
every unpleasant situation
in which you may find yourself.
Don’t get stuck in a rut
or hung up on an outdated blessing. You serve a God of change!
Barbara Johnson |
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That experience showed me that I – from moment to
moment – am the only person
in control of my connection to God.
It’s not that God is deciding to connect with me,
depending on
whether I had a good day, or did good or bad deeds.
It’s all up to me.
God, the awareness of God, the love of God, the blessings of
God – that lively
ecstasy – is always there.
It’s me who separates from God by judging,
by indulging in
negativity, by criticizing myself, as well as others.
Barbara De Angelis |
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There are dry, fruitless, lonely places in each
of our lives, where we seem to travel alone, sometimes feeling as though
we must surely have lost the way. What
am I doing here? How did this
happen? Lord, get me out of
this!
He does not get us
out. Not when
we ask for it,
at any rate, because it
was He all along who brought us to this place. He has been here before—it is
not wilderness to Him, and He
walks with us. There are
things to be seen and learned in these apparent wastelands
which cannot be
seen and learned in
the “city”—in places of comfort, convenience,
and company.
God does not intend to
make it no wasteland. He
intends rather to keep
us, to hold us with His strength, to
sustain us
with His sure words, in a
place where there is nothing else
we can count
on.
Elisabeth Elliot
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God who is goodness and truth is also beauty.
It is this innate
human and divine longing, found in the company of
goodness
and truth, that is able to recognize and leap up at beauty
and
rejoice and know that all is beautiful, that there is not one speck
of
beauty under the sun that does not mirror back the beauty of God.
Roberta Bondi |
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Here’s an experiment: For one whole day think, speak, and act exactly
as you would
if you were absolutely convinced of the truth of the statements
that God
has all power and infinite intelligence, and that His nature is
infinite
goodness and love. To think
in this manner all day will be the most
difficult thing, because thought
is so subtle. To speak in
accordance with
these truths will be easier, if you are vigilant.
To act in accordance
with them will be the easiest part, although
it may require much
in the way of moral courage.
Emmet Fox
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The material world. . . says:
If you use this product, you will be popular.
If you live in this neighborhood, you have arrived.
If you win this award,
your worth will be validated.
The material world demands that you do
something to earn favor.
God doesn’t work this way. His
grace is a gift.
There’s
nothing we can do to make God love us more.
There’s nothing we
can do—or can have done—to make God love
us less. And when we accept
this—not just nonchalantly agree, intellectually, that it’s true, but
hide it
in our very hearts—it fills our life sails with a cleansing
breeze.
Bob Welch |
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Life is nothing but the expansion of love.
We can cultivate divine love
by entering into the Source.
The Source is God, who is all Love.
We must try to love all of humanity with the inner awareness,
consciousness, and conviction that inside
each individual is the living
presence of God.
Sri Chinmoy
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God is no White Knight who charges into the world
to pluck us
like distressed damsels from the jaws of dragons, or diseases.
God chooses to become present to and through us.
It is up to us to rescue one another.
Nancy Mairs |
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We have often heard it said that God never closes
one door unless he opens another.
It
is a great comfort to know we never really lose when we believe, for any
defeat can be
turned to good if we will absorb the lesson in it.
And yet, how often we refuse to go through
that door that has been
opened for us. It is so much
easier to stand back and wail about
the closed one.
There seems to be a certain amount of gratification in defeat.
Sometimes a door will close for us because that particular one
would have caused us
more unhappiness, but it never closes for punishment.
God is love—and love does not
punish, nor does it have any power
but to give what is right and good for us.
With this knowledge we can walk with grace through those doors that
open to us.
Joyce Hifler
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Far beyond your intellect, far beyond your
understanding,
lies inexhaustible knowledge and wealth, strength and
power,
peace and joy. Do not
use your intellect to find the answers
for God and his manifestations.
Everything is God.
Swami
Vishnu-Devananda |
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This kind of split makes me crazy, this
territorializing of the holy.
Here
God may dwell. Here God may
not dwell. It contradicts
everything in my experience, which says:
God dwells where I dwell. Period.
Nancy Mairs |
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View life as a learning opportunity.
Ask God what He wants you to learn
from the situations you face. .
. . When we set aside specific time to listen,
He often encourages us with
His presence and promises, and interprets
to some degree the circumstances
of life. Take advantage of
the natural lull
after hard times when you’re pulling together the
pieces to
sort through the events and ferret out the lessons.
Jean Fleming
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We all know that it is God alone who is our
peace—although nearly all of us
forget it from time to time. We
forget it when we begin to neglect our daily visit
with God. Now, when you think
that you are too busy for your daily visit,
let me ask you frankly, what wonderful thing are you doing that is more
important?
There is nothing that you could possibly do with that time that would
bring you
greater benefit than perfect peace. As a matter of fact, if you have something
very important and urgent to do, your visit will make that very important
thing go through much more easily and successfully.
Emmet Fox
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Once,
hurrying through a busy airport to get to my gate
on time for a connecting flight, I came upon a lady
in a wheelchair.
Amidst the chaos of the hundreds
of people rushing around us, my eyes met hers.
The sweetest smile appeared on her face.
I smiled back,
but I knew she would never fully realize how that
small gesture had filled my soul.
I believe that
God is in our everyday.
Many moments occur in our
lives which reveal his face, his touch, his voice.
Look for him today.
He will be found.
Kathy Troccoli |
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God
is a tranquil Being, and abides in a tranquil eternity.
So must your spirit
become a tranquil and clear little pool, wherein the serene light of God
can be mirrored. . . . Nothing in the whole world is worth the loss of
your peace;
even the faults which you have committed should only humble, but not
disquiet you.
God is full of joy, peace, and happiness.
Endeavor then to obtain a continually joyful
and peaceful spirit.
Avoid all anxious care, vexation, murmuring, and melancholy,
which darken your soul.
If you perceive such feelings arising,
turn gently away from them.
G. Terstregen |
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It’s
really quite simple.
When we look at a tree, God is there.
When we look at a flower, God is there.
When we look at the sky,
God is there.
When we look at the earth, God is there.
We can
see God in the faces of people on the street, in the faces of our
children, our friends, our partners, our colleagues, and our bosses.
When we see God shining through the faces of all those
around us—those like us and those unlike us—every moment
becomes a prayer and the world becomes a different place to live in.
Anne Wilson Schaef |
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If
we are completely honest with ourselves we know deep down in our hearts
that the usual goals and strivings of self-sufficiency and
self-fulfillment we have
are not our real destiny.
We sense an uneasiness with the common, ordinary life
of delights and pleasures, and begin to hear this quiet voice from the
soul’s depths, a whispering of a more meaningful, richer life.
We are in essence
seeking God and feel that He is indeed drawing us to Him.
When we respond, it is to God that we are responding.
Clara M. Matheson |
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God doesn’t expect us to perform for him.
He loves us always—when
we’re disappointed or hurt or making a mess of things.
Sometimes we
speak to him in a language that only he can understand.
What matters
to him is that we are vulnerable, that we are completely ourselves.
We are work, too, but God cherishes us.
Luci Swindoll |
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We
are all born with a belief in God.
It may not have a name or face.
We may not even see it as God.
But it is there.
It is the sense
that comes over us as we stare into the starlit sky, or watch the last
fiery rays of an evening sunset.
It is the morning shiver as we wake
on a beautiful day and smell a richness in the air that we know and
love from somewhere we can’t quite recall.
It is the mystery behind
the beginning of time and beyond the limits of space.
It is a
sense of otherness that brings alive something deep in our hearts.
Kent Nerburn |
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