Hello friend,

As you may know, and will most certainly learn - should you courageously keep reading - is that I love quotes. They convict, educate, and inspire. I’m always looking for new ones so please send me your favourites now, or when you’re finished reading this post. I’m limiting myself to quotes, not full poems or musical lyrics because I’m sure I have enough of those for two or three separate articles.

1. “We who follow Jesus are working in wounds, working with wounds and working through wounds.” Willie Jennings

I love this quote because it speaks to the pain I feel in my own life, especially in real life with real relationships with people, who mostly only inflict pain on me because they are in pain. We’re in this together, and as I continue to learn, we all must be grace dispensers. I can’t recall ever hearing this term before, but after googling it just now, I came across a beautiful article by Philip Yancey on his blog about a grace dispenser named Linda Wilson-Allen, a metro-transit operator in San Fransisco. 

2. "We can rest contentedly in our sisns and in our stupidities, and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world" C.S. Lews

Need I say more? C.S. Lewis is one of my favourite authors and this isn't the last you'll see of him in my thoughts and musings.

3. "Those that are above others in power and dignity ought to go before others, and endeavour to go beyond them, in everything that is good. The more any are advance the more is expected from them, on acount of the greater opportunity they have of serving God and their generation. What are wealth and authority good for, but as they enable a man to do so much more good in the world?" Matthew Henry

The Matthew Henry Commentary is one of my favourite Bible Commentaries, and the entire thing can be found for free online. Anytime a passage or story in Scripture has me stumped for good application, I hop online to see what good 'ole Matthew Henry thought. Could I pull the book off my shelf instead? Absolutely. But then I'd have to put down my coffee and get off the couch.

4. "I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all, I still know quite certainly, that just to be alive, is a grand thing." Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie happens to be my favourite mystery writer of all time, and I know a great many others can say the same. I recently inherited about twenty books by her from my avid reader and beloved Oma (Dutch for Grandmother), and my favourite book of the lot was actually her "Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir" about her time in the Middle East.

5. “Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night's sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.” Lemony Snicket

Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American novelist Daniel Handler, who wrote the relatively well-known A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the less well-known short story The Beatrice Letters. Whenever I'm having a bad day at work, I just look up some of his quotes, share them with my poor intern, and laugh myself to a better mood. I highly advise this course of action for your next bad day.

Thanks for reading!

Onward and upward,

Maria