Classic & Contemporary Excerpts from January 11, 1999

First, Seek God

So I say to you, seek God and discover Him and make Him a power in your life. Without Him all of our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest nights. Without Him life is a meaningless drama with the decisive scenes missing. But with Him we are able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. With Him we are able to rise from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy. St. Augustine was right—we were made for God and we will be restless until we find rest in Him.

—Martin Luther King, Jr., in The Words of Martin Luther King Jr., compiled by Coretta Scott King

Of Faith and Science

To look up out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible. It just strengthens my faith.

—Astronaut John Glenn at a news conference following his 1998 shuttle flight

God Shows Himself Everywhere

Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. That is not just fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything—in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It’s impossible. The only thing is is that we don’t see it.

—Thomas Merton in a 1965 audiotape

What the Poor Need

What the poor need, even more than food and clothing and shelter (though they need these, too, desperately), is to be wanted. It is the outcast state their poverty imposes upon them that is the more agonizing.

—Mother Teresa in Something Beautiful for God

What Really Matters

We have to give ourselves wholeheartedly to God, and if we fail, we must give ourselves again. We all need daily forgiveness for our sins and failures. But what matters is whether we want to be faithful—faithful to the end of our lives. This means surrendering everything—our self-will, our hopes for personal happiness, our private property, even our weaknesses—and believing in God and in Christ. This is all that is asked of anyone. Jesus does not expect perfection, but he wants us to give ourselves wholeheartedly.

—J. Heinrich Arnold in Discipleship: Living for Christ in the Daily Grind

Finding Grace

The moment of grace comes to us in the dynamics of any situation we walk into. It is an opportunity that God sews into the fabric of a routine situation. It is a chance to do something creative, something helpful, something healing, something that makes one unmarked spot in the world better off for our having been there. We catch it if we are people of discernment.

—Lewis Smedes in A Pretty Good Person

God Is Our Fuel

God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

—C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

A Life of Grace

All Christians are considered to have a call to what is commonly termed “the priesthood of all believers”; all are expected to use their lives so as to reveal the grace of the Holy Spirit working through them. It’s a tall order, to literally be a sacrament, and it helps to remember Jesus’ statement in the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel: “You did not choose me; I chose you.”

—Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace