Faith

"Throwing down your staff is letting go and letting God. And that's counterintuitive for those of us who are control freaks. As our executive pastor Joel Schmidgall likes to say, "You can have faith or you can have control, but you cannot have both." If you want God to do something off the chart, you have to take your hands off the controls."

"Faith in God is force of life."

"Increase in faith, fade any fears."

"Faith is an active force."

"Patience is a firm faith."

"Faith in action works and gets far good results than faith"

"Nothing is lost, Sassenach; only changed."That's the first law of thermodynamics," I said, wiping my nose."No," he said. "That's faith."

"You must let other people to challenge your truths; you must let them to question your faith and the reason for this is very simple: Your truths might be very wrong; your faith might be very mistaken. Don’t be a castle; you need bridges surrounding you, not walls! And remember that walls belong only to cowards!"

"For the first time in my life, I'm doubting my faith, and it terrifies me. For the first time, I want to change the rules. For the first time I wonder: does it matter what it says on your skin, when what's at stake is your soul?"

"The sacred fire is faith."

"I still don’t know where the river begins, or where it ends. I don’t know where it comes from, or where it goes. I don’t know what it looked like yesterday, or what it will look like tomorrow,”Father Dominic put forth.“How the heck am I supposed to see all that from here?” Thomas pleaded. Father Dominic smiled, his body shaking slightly as he silently laughed.“Exactly, Thomas. Exactly. Now, think of your life as this river. If I were to ask you to describe it to me, how much of your life would you be able to share?”This was a question Thomas had never thought about before. Considering his life like this felt strange, uncomfortable.“I guess I’d share just about as much. I’d only talk about the part I can see right now. I guess I’d only tell you about what I know,” Thomas offered."

"I now think it takes more faith to name our need than to keep believing that something will happen and not doing anything about it. It takes faith, and great courage, to get help, to take the first painful step toward the dream that is in our hearts... I know now that you can look at bricks and cement for years, believing in the vision of a home, but until you get down on your hands and knees and start to build, it will remain a dream."

"Sometimes we simply don't want to face the truth about ourselves; the myth reads so much better. Sometimes we do not seek help because it will mean we have to change, and change is painful and unpredictable. To me, now, faith is bringing all that is true about our lives into the blinding light of God's grace. It is believing that He will still be there at the end of the journey, and so will we, perhaps a little bloodied, probably with a limp, and possibly, as the Skin Horse said, with most of our hair loved off, but we will be there."

"The sacred fire never goes out."

"If we grow in faith, we shall never seize to bear fresh fruit."

"Fundamentalism not only fuels devastating acts of violence, but also all kinds of primitive prejudicial behaviors, such as Misogyny, Polygamy, Homophobia, and Islamophobia."

"Why should a religion claim that it is not bound to abide by the standpoint of reason! If one does not take the standard of reason, there cannot be any true judgment, even in the case of religion."

"The one ultimate rule of the Quranic fundamentalists is “there is one God and Mohammed is his prophet”. Everything beyond that not only is bad, but must be destroyed forthwith. At moment’s notice, every man or woman, who does not exactly believe in that, must be killed... This is not religion my friend. This is primitiveness at its worst."

"A person may hold his own beliefs and creeds to be dearest, and nourish them with all his might, but the moment he starts preaching the exclusive greatness and dominance over all other systems of beliefs and creeds, the world begins to plunge into a death trap."

"The term “musalman” refers to someone with “musallam iman”, that means, a pure conscience. Thus, any individual whose conscience is pure and clear, who can think for himself or herself, is a musalman or muslim, regardless of socio-religious background. Likewise, any human being who loves the neighbor as much as his or her own family is a Christian."