I mentioned in an earlier post a book I am currently reading. It is entitled Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning. I am taking my time reading this as I am studying it with a friend, but I keep coming across amazing thought provoking quotes. I hope you don't mind if I post a few occasionally. I would love to hear your thoughts after you read them.
Based on this thought, "The foremost quality of a trusting disciple is gratefulness. Gratitude arises from the lived perception, evaluation, and acceptance of all of life as grace-as an undeserved and unearned gift from the Father's hand. Such recognition is itself the work of grace, and acceptance of the gift is implicitly an acknowledgement of the giver."
That being said and understood here is a quote by Henri Nouwen.
"To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives-the good as well as the bad, the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections-that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. Let's not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God."
"Let the words of my mouth bring You praise, Let the words that I speak be seasoned with Your love and grace, Let the things, O Lord, that I choose to say bring glory, not shame to Your name each day. Let the words of my mouth bring You Praise."
1 comment:
I wish I could say I was up for that kind of hard spiritual work... It is definitely a challenge to be grateful for those things that stretch us and hurt us, even tho we know that those times are often when we draw nearest to our good God.
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