Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one

If you are reading this, be sure to count this on your blessings list.

The lights of prayer that make us imagine we are beginning to be angels are sometimes only signs that we are finally beginning to be men. We do not have a high enough opinion of our own nature. We think we are at the gates of heaven and we are only just beginning to come...

Satan dreads nothing but prayer. His one concern is to keep the saints from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, he mocks our wisdom, but he trembles when we pray.

All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day – one for each namaaz – ripple across the globe from longitude to...

Prayer is an insurance policy that you can never lapse on.

If you’ve ever tried meditation and didn’t stay with it, I recommend you try it again. Some time has passed. In the interim, you may have developed the discipline of mind or the patience you were short on before. Let these qualities aid your practice. (173)

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly. (friend who is a priest said regarding prayer)

Work as if everything depended upon work and pray as if everything depended upon prayer.

Temples and churches have become social centers. They have lost their original purpose because the minds of the people are more attracted to worldly things than to prayer. The lips repeat the prayer mechanically like a phonograph record, but the mind wanders to other places. (23-24)

Thy will be done, my Lord. Because you know the weakness in the heart of yourchildren, and you assign each of them only the burden they can bear. May youunderstand my love–because it is the only thing I have that is really mine, the only thing that I will be able to take with me...

As it is the sister of reading, so it is the mother of prayer. Though a man’s heart be much indisposed to prayer, yet, if he can but fall into a meditation of God, and the things of God, his heart will soon come off to prayer….Begin with reading or hearing. Go on with meditation;...

Just the same way I’d say a prayer before going onstage, taking that even further and using the drum to inspire people. And using that as a vehicle for the intention.

If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.

Even if there were no ear for them but the void, our prayers would still be the only things that sanctify our existence.

When you live by God’s Word, your life works. When you live without God’s Word, life doesn’t work. God’s Word builds you up, feeds your soul, and gives you strength, direction, guidance, hope, encouragement, and faith. Remember that He gave you His Word so that you would know Him and the way He wants You...

Know that when you praise and worship God and appreciate fully all that He is, you open up a channel through which more of His love pours into your heart.

The battle for our lives, and the lives of our children, our husbands, our friends, our families, & our nation, is waged on our knees.

When we forgive someone, it doesn’t justify what they’ve done. It releases them into God’s hands so He can deal with them.

God wants to bless us in many ways that require faith. We must trust that He is answering our prayers even when we can’t see it.

Lord, I pray that my husband will be strong in the Lord and put on the whole armor of God, so he can stand against the enemy every day. Enable him to take up the shield of faith, helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.

As prayer warriors, we must remember that no matter how hopeless a situation may appear to us, God gives us power in prayer to do something about it. We may be overwhelmed by it, but God isn’t. We may not see a way out, but God can. Because of Him, we can make a difference!

When things are good in your life, take the time to build and fortify your relationship with the Lord. Never become complacent about your relationship with Him, because there’s always room to grow DEEPER!

I believe a boy can have anything in life that he wants once he starts working for it. The main thing is not to give up. It makes no difference how tough things get, just bow your back, keep working, and put your heart and soul into it. As you go along your way, live...

Prayer implies surrender to the will of the giver, demand preconceives a right to receive. Pray, my dear, and you shall receive.

Since the beginning of the world, a prayer is a prayer and a curse is a curse– no matter the people– no matter the language– Man has given a thousand different namesto his god, but look into the face of each one– long enough– hard enough– You will find one truth.

I don’t pray because it doesn’t work. Prayer doesn’t fix anything. Bad things happen anyway.

Not being changed by prayer is sort of life standing in the middle of a spring rain without getting wet. It’s hard to stand in the center of God’s acceptance and love without getting it all over you.

In anguish and desperation, I reached out as I had many times before to the presence I call the Beloved. This unconditionally loving and wakeful awareness had always been a refuge for me.

As I watched them file down the stairs, I didn’t cry and I wasn’t afraid. But I couldn’t tell if it was Jesus or the gin.

Fasting is a weapon in a Christian’s spiritual arsenal and you need to know when to use it

Discouragement, fear, and depression—three villains who lurk in the dark.They slip inside souls with a blindfold and goals to shatter your dreams and extinguish your spark.Their tactics are highly effective.They crush a great many each day.And under their spell it is easy to dwellOn fiascoes and failures that end in dismay.The heart and the mind...

Again, “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), and here the word to pray does not mean to beg or to plead as if God were unwilling to give–but simply to expose by faith every situation as it arises, to the all-sufficiency of the One who indwells you by His life.

He wanted to know how they prayed to God in El Dorado. “We do not pray to him at all,” said the reverend sage. “We have nothing to ask of him. He has given us all we want, and we give him thanks continually.

Fuck!” and that was no obscenity, but a most earnest prayerful utterance.In the final analysis, no matter what the vocabulary of prayer, or where muteness displaces words in prayer, the content—what is communicated by a person in the world before God—in prayer is in each and every circumstance the same and it can be put...

I’m convinced that one of the most powerful forces on earth is the prayer of a child.

The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace.

talk,” or a frivolously conversational form of affective prayer which is sometimes cultivated in convents, but a dialogue of love and of choice. A dialogue of deep wills.

Hence the aim of meditation, in the context of Christian faith, is not to arrive at an objective and apparently ‘scientific’ knowledge of God, but to come to know him through the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us. Our knowledge of God is paradoxically a knowledge not...

Prayer does not blind us to the world, but it transforms our vision of the world, and makes us see it, all men, and all the history of mankind, in the light of God. To pray ‘in spirit and in truth’ enables us to enter into contact with that infinite love, that inscrutable freedom which...

Mrs. Mudkin closed her eyes. “We should pray.””I ain’t praying,” Crazy Cora said. Mrs. Mudkin said, “Lord, please bless—“”I ain’t praying.””–this land and the people who–“”I ain’t praying.””–have toiled on this earth–“”Stop that praying.””I can pray if I want to.””Then be quiet about it.

Only when we can accept God as he is can we give up the desire for spiritual experiences that we can feel.

The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable…. It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that “to work is to pray.” (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)

Bargaining with God is pointless. He already has a thousand followers that will do what you bargained to do for free.

It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God’s dust and God’s breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of...

Or I would be the rain itself, wreathing over the island, mingling in the quiet of moist places, filling its pores with its saturated breaths. And I would be the wind, whispering through the tangled woods, running airy fingers over the island’s face, tingling in the chill of concealed places, sighing secrets in the dawn....

Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was...

They send me an application. Me and my husband said one small prayer, we filled it out, sent it in. And then next thing you know we got the house. Oh my God, we was screaming.

[God] wants your adoration. He wants your confessions. He wants your thankfulness. He wants your requests. But most of all, He wants you and your love for Him with all your heart, strength, mind, and soul. What a joy it is to be so wanted by the Creator of everything.

I don’t know what heavy penance I would not have gladly undertaken rather than practice prayer.