Wonderfully Complicated

"Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord's wounds at arm's length.  Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others.  He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people's lives and know the power of tenderness.  Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people."

-- Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, 270

Catherine Doherty on Getting through the Hard Times

“We Russians used to talk about this in New York.  We had a very rough time when we first came.  We were overworked and underpaid.  We used to discuss among ourselves how we survived.  We came to the conclusion that we survived because we really believed that God was our rest.  When I asked a friend of mine, ‘How do we survive?’ this is exactly what she said:  ‘Oh, we have Christ for a pillow.’”

-- Catherine Doherty, Poustinia


When It Hurts, Remember You Are an Eternal, Living House

C.S. Lewis has a special way of explaining things….

 

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."