Catherine Marshall Quotes

No matter how little you have, you can always give some of it away.

I learned that true forgiveness includes total self-acceptance. And out of acceptance wounds are healed and happiness is possible again.

Our prayers must not be efforts to bend God to our will but to yield ourselves to His.

It's today I must be living.

Lord, what are you trying to teach me?

The only time I ever find my dealings with God less than clear-cut is when I'm not being honest with Him. The fuzziness is always on my side, not His.

Some of what I wrote bordered on blasphemy ... If there was a God, He would have to be truth. And in that case, candor
however impertinent
would be more pleasing to Him than posturing.

There are precious things you can't pack and take with you, like the all-pervasive fragrance of honeysuckle.

Truth could never be wholly contained in words.

I understood that the reason we have to accept other people is simply because God receives us just the way we are. Yes, all of us to the last person ...
I had never thought it should be that way. Had I been doing it, I would have arranged gradations of acceptability according to how bad or how good we were
or how hard we have tried. But ... the Power who broods over our aching world has quite a different idea: He persists in receiving us and loving us all even when we reject Him and refuse to have anything to do with Him, even when we strut our little intellects and insist that He does not exist.

Poverty is a scandal of our times because it CAN be changed.

There's fire in you, Julie. I can see you out there in the street, carrying a banner for all the underprivileged people of the world.

God insists that we ask, not because He needs to know our situation, but because we need the spiritual discipline of asking.

Often God has to shut a door in our face, so that He can subsequently open the door through which He wants us to go.

I was too old for my father to (be protective), too young to be flattered.

Once we recognize our need for Jesus, then the building of our faith begins. It is a daily, moment-by-moment life of absolute dependence upon Him for everything

His theology is mostly focused on helping people with their physical needs. All that's important, of course, but he'll hit a dry spell someday and need something more than social causes to keep him going." ...
"if you're serious about writing on the deeper life, you simply cannot ignore the centrality of Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

The search for God begins at the point of need.

I still don't understand anything- exept that somehow I know that You are love. And that in my heart has been so great a love for Christy as I did not know could exist on this earth. You, God, must be responsible. You must have put it there. So what do I do with it now?

So once I shut down my privilege of disliking anyone I choose and holding myself aloof if I could manage it, greater understanding, growing compassion came to me.

The lake is lovely," I commented, "And so big. I still find it hard to believe it's artificial."
"Oh, it's artificial, all right. Dive deep and you may bash your head on tree stumps.

One can believe intellectually in the efficacy of prayer and never do any praying.

Why should a child's future be shaped by where they are born?

The unfolding of our friendship with the Father will be a never-ending revelation strretching on into eternity

Of course you'll encounter trouble. But behold a God of power who can take any evil and turn it into a door of hope.

So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It's quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you've come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about.

When we hold a photo negative up to the light all objects are reversed. Black is white, white is black. Moreover, the character lines of any face in the picture are not clear. Once placed into the developing solution, what photographers call "the latent image" is revealed in the print-darkness is turned to light; and, lo, we have a beautiful picture.

Clean up a pigsty," she commented one evening, "and if the creatures in it still have pig-minds and pig-desires, soon it will be the same old pigsty again.

Have you ever thought that the only ugly things in this Cove are man's fault, while the beautiful things are God's work? Look at those mountains.

Acceptance says, True, this is my situation at the moment. I'll look unblinkingly at the reality of it. But I'll also open my hands to accept willingly whatever a loving Father sends me.

Dean's eyes were studying me. "You have a way with words. What kind of writing do you want to do?"
"Articles for Dad's paper, to start."
"What do you want to write about?"
I paused, suddenly uncertain about how much to share. Dean's eyes were reassuring.
"When I know more, I'd like to write about deeper things.

Still, he never felt that the sermons he wrote at the cottage were good. By the time he got back to Washington to preach them, they no longer excited him. They seemed cold, lifeless. This was probably because Peter's best sermons rose out of the soil of emotion in his own heart. That emotion had to be a present, valid reality. He could not conjure it up.

I'm all for Spencer. He's sincere, idealistic, and a good preacher. I just don't believe that social action is the main business of the Church."
"Then what is?"
"Salvation.

For years I lived in inner terror that I was, at heart, a weak and indecisive man. I think it was this fear that made me sick. Dean showed me how foolish all this was. 'Face the truth, Ken,' he told me. 'You are weak. All of us are. Come to terms with it.'
But then he pointed out I didn't have to stay this way, that God was certainly not weak. Dean has helped me understand that if I have the Spirit of God within me, then His strength would replace my weakness ...

I'd long since learned that no difference in viewpoint should ever be allowed to cause the least break in love. Indeed, it cannot, if it's real love.
... But relationships can be kept intact without compromising one's own beliefs. And if we do not keep them intact, but give up and allow the chasm, we're breaking the second greatest commandment.

Like most ministers, Peter was not the best judge of his own sermons. Almost invariably when he thought he had written one of his best, the rest of us did not rate it so highly. And, when on Saturday night he was bemoaning a "terrible sermon," he could be pretty sure his congregation would think it terrific. How other people rated his sermons was a constant source of astonishment to him. "That's what keeps me humble," he often said.

There's always the danger that the extreme feminist will end up quite unfulfilled as a girl.

One can believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ and feel no personal loyalty to Him at all - indeed, pay no attention whatever to His commandments and His will for one's life.

The purpose of all prayer is to find God's will and to make that our prayer

Have you ever watched a baby learning to walk? He totters, arms stretched out to balance himself. He wobbles - and falls, perhaps bumps his nose. Then he puts the palms of his little hands flat on the floor, hikes his rear end up, looks around to see if anybody is watching him. If nobody is, usually he doesn't bother to cry, just precariously balances himself - and tries again. Well, the baby can teach us. What you've undertaken ... isn't a state of perfection to be arrived at all of the sudden. It's a WALK, and a walk isn't static but ever-changing. We Friends say that all discouragement is from an evil source and can only end in more evil. Wallowing in self-condemnation or feeling sorry for yourself is worse than falling on your face in the first place ... So thee is human.

Those who never rebelled against God or at some point in their lives shaken their fists in the face of heaven, have never encountered God at all.

Perceptive people like you wound more easily than others. But if we're going to work on God's side, we have to decide to open our hearts to the griefs and pain all around us. It's not an easy decision. A dangerous one too. And a tiny narrow door to enter into a whole new world.
But in that world a great experience waits for us: meeting the One who's entered there before us. He suffers more than any of us could because His is the deepest emotion and the highest perception ... He doesn't just leave us and Himself in the anguish. At the point where His ultimate in love meets His total capacity to absorb and feel all our agony, there the miracle happens and the exterior situation changes. I've seen that miracle

God's way of dealing with us is to throw us into situations over our depth, then supply us with the necessary ability to swim.

Living in the middle of beauty like this, we've no call to have puny ideas about God. Why do you suppose His world is so fancy-fine, so full of wonderment if He doesn't want everything to be good and perfect and right and healthy? But we can spoil His good work. When we mess things up, then we shouldn't blame Him and try to make ourselves feel better by contending that it's what He wanted.

I might have felt unimportant pitted against the awesome might of the mountains. I did not. Rather, on that mountain top I found something important that I had never known before: an awareness of a vital connection between me and the Authority behind all this beauty.

God is the only one who can make the valley of trouble a door of hope.

I often marveled that the interior peace of the woman was reflected so faithfully in her surroundings. Even the selection and arrangements of her possessions gave an aura of uncluttered calm. In addition, there was a directness in her approach to all of life
including housekeeping
that never failed to fascinate me.
Miss Alice was a person to whom color, symmetry of line and contrast of texture were important.

If your every human plan and calculation has miscarried, if, one by one, human props have been knocked out, and doors have shut in your face, take heart. God is trying to get a message through to you, and the message is: "Stop depending on inadequate human resources. Let me handle the matter." ...

Despite disappointments, the Christian is obligated to pray for the sick because we are bidden to do so and because the crumb of our caring is but a morsel broken from the whole loaf of the Father's infinite and tender love.