Two Years in Haiti: September 2008

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Do I love only what comforts me?

I read the book of Jonah this morning. It grabbed me. And hasn’t quite let go yet. The book is always striking of course. But, this morning I looked closer at the illustration of the vine and the worm that the Lord uses to reveal Jonah’s heart.

Jonah is angry at the Lord for sparing sinful people, so he walks off. He builds a shelter, but the hot sun beats upon him. The Lord makes a vine grow. It provides shade and eases Jonah’s discomfort. But then the Lord has a worm kill the vine. Jonah loses his shade and wishes to die.

Jonah was concerned about a vine that provided him with shade, but the fate of over 120,000 people did not move him.

A question came to me: Do I love only what comforts me or provides me a service?

I realized that this is a question that cannot be ignored. If I love in this manner it cannot begin until someone provides me something I like. And it cannot continue once that person stops providing what I like. Of course, this is no love at all.

When the Lord loves it is free and unconditional. Often it brings great pains to himself. It does not end. It is not selfish. He loves because that is who He is.

May my love be as the Lord’s love. May I love the kids at House of Hope with this love. May I love strangers as the Lord loves. And someday if the Lord deems me worthy of a wife may I love her fully and as the He loves.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Hanna's Handiwork

Click here for some pictures from MSNBC of the flooding in Haiti caused by hurricane Hanna. Please be praying for the people in Haiti. Two more hurricanes are on the way.

Great Quotes

"Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ." – Jerome

"The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise." – Tacitus

"Despair is the conclusion of fools." – Benjamin Disraeli

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." – Jim Elliot

"Wherever you are, be all there. Live to the hilt every situation that you believe to be the will of God." – Jim Elliot

"Father, make of me a crisis man. Bring those I contact to decision. Let me not be a milepost on a single road; make me a fork, that men must turn one way or another on facing Christ in me. " - Jim Elliot

"And people who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives... and when the bubble has burst they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted." - Nate Saint

"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold." - Helen Keller

"He is the best man who, when making his plans, fears and reflects on everything that can happen to him, but in the moment of action is bold." - Herodotus

"I am of the opinion that the boldest measures are the safest." - Horatio Nelson

"Freedom lies in being bold." - Robert Frost

"Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference." - Winston Churchill

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." – Winston Churchill

"I believe in Christianity as I believe in the rising sun; not because I see it, but by it I can see all else." – C.S. Lewis

"Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them." – Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"A man's as miserable as he thinks he is." – Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind." – Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." - Mark Twain

"Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way. We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions." - Aristotle

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore." - Andre Gide

"We must view young people not as empty bottles to be filled, but as candles to be lit." - Robert H. Shaffer

"The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." - Mark Twain

"Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge." - Mark Twain

"What a strange kind of salvation do they desire that they care not for holiness…They would have their sins forgiven, not that they may walk with God in love, but that they may practice their enmity against Him without fear of punishment." - Walter Marshall

"God isn’t looking for people of great faith, but for individuals ready to follow Him" - Hudson Taylor

"The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt." - Thomas Merton

"People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest." - Hermann Hesse

"You learn to love by loving." - Francis de Sales

"Beware you are not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge." - John Wesley

"The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost." - G.K. Chesterton

"Love is the great conqueror of lust." - C.S. Lewis

"Had I cared for the comments of people, I should never have been a missionary." - C.T. Studd

"Today Christians spend more money on dog food than missions." - Leonard Ravenhill

"'Not called!' did you say? 'Not heard the call,' I think you should say. Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father's house and bid their brothers and sisters, and servants and masters not to come there. And then look Christ in the face, whose mercy you have professed to obey, and tell him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish his mercy to the world." - William Booth

"Without Christ, not one step; with Him, anywhere!" - David Livingstone

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor." - Mark Twain

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." - Johann von Goethe

"I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom." - Anatole France

"Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life." - Robert Louis Stevenson

"It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done." - Samuel Johnson

"And in the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." - Abraham Lincoln

"Depend on it. God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supply. He is too wise a God to frustrate His purposes for lack of funds, and He can just as easily supply them ahead of time as afterwards, and He much prefers doing so. - J. Hudson Taylor

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." - Johann von Goethe

"Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"He that dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose." - Anne Bronte

"Love takes up where knowledge leaves off." - Thomas Aquinas

"I count life just a stuff to try the soul's strength on." - Robert Browning

"Never elated when someone's oppressed, never dejected when another one's blessed." - Alexander Pope

"Never find fault with the absent." - Alexander Pope

"No one should be ashamed to admit they are wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that they are wiser today than they were yesterday." - Alexander Pope

"Boldness is a mask for fear, however great." - John Dryden

"Either be wholly slaves or wholly free." - John Dryden

"Even victors are by victories undone." - John Dryden

"Happy the man, and happy he alone, he who can call today his own; he who, secure within, can say, tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today." - John Dryden

"He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear." - John Dryden

"He who would search for pearls must dive below." - John Dryden

"Let grace and goodness be the principal loadstone of thy affections. For love which hath ends, will have an end; whereas that which is founded on true virtue, will always continue." - John Dryden

"Look around the inhabited world; how few know their own good, or knowing it, pursue." - John Dryden

"Only man clogs his happiness with care, destroying what is with thoughts of what may be." - John Dryden

"The sooner you treat your son as a man, the sooner he will be one." - John Dryden

"Learn from your dreams what you lack." - W.H. Auden

Two Years in Haiti

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Do I love only what comforts me?

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Hanna's Handiwork

Mission

WATCH THE KRAZE TRAILER

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Great Quotes

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Two Years in Haiti

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Do I love only what comforts me?

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Hanna's Handiwork

Mission

WATCH THE KRAZE TRAILER

Follow Me On Twitter

Pages

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Great Quotes

Blog Archive