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Quote by A. I. Smith

“When God wants to test us, he sometimes takes away what we are craving the most. For reasons only he knows, he deprives us of our most beloved dreams. I believe that all people experience a time when they go to Calvary and carry the cross." "My cross is the worst! It’s not made of wood but of the heaviest metal!" "All people believe that their own cross is the heaviest. The only thing that makes them feel better is looking at the suffering of others—seeing the pain of their fellow man. We all need to evaluate our old life and see how we have sinned and made God send us trials.”

Quote by A. I. Smith

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A. I. Smith

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“Will we understand the father’s joy? Will we let the Father embrace us? This is our resistance to living a joyful life. God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found. It is God’s joy, not the joy that the world offers. It is the joy that comes from seeing a child walk home amid all the destruction, devastation, and anguish of the world. It is a hidden joy.”

PainJoySufferingSpiritualityTheologyAnguishSelf DestructionParablesProdigal Son
Book:The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming
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“I sit for a long stretch of time, focusing on that pain like an original point, like the early ache of displacement that explodes into the shape of our lives, like the fires which rage around us for the entirety of our days, threatening to swallow us blank. But as I wrap my breath around that original point, as I sink deeper and deeper into the loss, I feel a shiver like presence. I squint and imagine the pit splintering open. A spot of red at the center: Is this joy?”

PainJoyHealing
Book:The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language
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“From its very beginning Christianity has been the proclamation of joy, of the only possible joy on earth. It rendered impossible all joy we usually think of as possible. But within this impossibility, at the very bottom of this darkness, it announced and conveyed a new all.-embracing joy, and with this joy it transformed the End into a Beginning. Without the proclamation of this joy Christianity is incomprehensible. It is only as joy that the Church was victorious in the world, and it lost the world when it lost that joy, and ceased to be a credible witness to it. Of all accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche when he said that Christians had no joy.”

JoyEaster
Book:For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
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“When I met them sick in the hospital, it was too late. But out there in the world, I seized on every bit of joy I could scrape out of the pan. These men had lived on the margins so long that coming into the light to ask for help scared them to death. I had to walk them through the steps, keeping things fun.”

LoveJoySupport
Book:All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South
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