Whitney

If you’ve ever known the love of God, you know it’s nothing but reckless and it’s nothing but raging. Sometimes it hurts to be loved, and if it doesn’t hurt it’s probably not love, may be infatuation. I think a lot of American people are infatuated with God, but we don’t really love Him, and they don’t really let Him love them. Being loved by God is one of the most painful things in the world, it’s also the only thing that can bring us salvation and it’s like everything else that is really wonderful, there’s a little bit of pain in it, little bit of hurt.

-      Rich Mullins

As always, it seems that the more I can distinguish my true needs and my wants, the more I am shocked to realize how little is enough.

- Kathleen Norris 

If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it… then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live here, their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides… The river will run clear, as we will never know it… On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down the old forest, an old forest will stand, its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots. The veins of forgotten springs will have opened. Families will be singing in the fields… Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove, and memory will grow into legend, legend into song, song into sacrament. The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its reality.

- Wendell Berry