Psalm 23

The Lord is my constant companion.
There is no need that He cannot fulfill.
Whether His course for me points
to the mountaintops of glorious joy
or to the valleys of human suffering,
He is by my side.
He is ever present with me.
He is close beside me
when I read the dark streets of danger,
and even when I flirt with death itself,
He will not leave me.
When the pain is severe,
He is near to comfort.
When the burden is heavy
He is there to lean upon.
When depression darkens my soul,
He touches me with eternal joy.
When I feel empty and alone,
He fills the aching vacuum with His power.
My security is in His promise
to be near me always
an in the knowledge
that He will never let me go.

From Psalms/Now by Leslie F. Brandt

Piper

Helping you embrace the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

A Praying Life, Paul E. Miller

p.10
The best our world has to offer is to teach you how to talk to yourself. Change what you tell yourself, and your feelings about what happened will change. Change your self-talk, and how you feel about yourself will change. Talk yourself out of getting upset about what you can't change. Do something constructive about what you can change. Those are the world's best efforts. It's a familiar but abnormal way to live.
- David Powlison

p. 20
Prayer is simply the medium through which we experience and connect to God.

p. 22
If God is sovereign, then he is in control of all the details of my life. If he is loving, then he is going to be shaping the details of my life for my good. If he is all-wise, then he's not going to do everything I want because I don't know what I need. If he is patient, then he is going to take time to do all this. When we put all these things together - God's sovereignty, love, wisdom, and patience - we have a divine story.

Unanswered prayers create some of the tensions in the story God is weaving in our lives.

If God is composing a story with our lives, then our lives are no longer static. We aren't paralyzed by life; we can hope.

We dull our souls with the narcotic of activity. The quest for a contemplative life can actually be self-absorbed, focused on my quiet and me. If we love people and have the power to help, then we are going to be busy. Learning to pray doesn't offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart. In the midst of the outer busyness we can develop an inner quiet.

p. 24
Love changes us. The second person of the Trinity, Jesus of Nazareth, now has a scarred body. The Trinity is different because of love.

Repentance, JI Packer

"Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged."
—J.I. Packer
Keep in Step with the Spirit, page 87

“Who am I?” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Who am I?”
By Dietrich Bonhoeffer (March 4, 1945)

Who am I? They often tell me
I would step from my cell’s confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me
I would talk to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me
I would bear the days of misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I know of myself?
restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
trembling in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine.

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Who am I?” in Letters & Papers From Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1953/1997), 347-8.

Ann Voskamp

Time is a relentless river and it rages on, respecter of no one.

And the only way to slow time is this: Enter fully into the current moment and the stream of time slows — slows — with the weight of a soul’s full attention.

We slow the torrent by being all here.

Life at its fullest is this sensitive, detonating sphere, and it can be carried only in the hands of the unhurried and reverential—a bubble held in awe.”

Ann Voskamp, author of "A Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are"

Letters to God

"I want him to know I'm not mad at him and that I understand why he makes fun of me. Mr. Perryfield says it's because I'm God's warrior and I make him feel things he doesn't want to feel. But that's good, because maybe he'll turn to God for the answers. Or something like that."

 from the movie "Letters to God"