Faith

"Faith is secured by adversity, but endangered by security."

"All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day - one for each namaaz - ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet - towards the house of God in Mecca."

"You didn’t just automatically become a Christian, did you? You weren’t made a Christian by just going to church. Just like you are not made a car by sitting in a garage all day! You have to make a decision."

"Any profession of faith…entrusts the mind and heart to a truth that cannot be proven but can be lived."

"...the ongoing suspicion that scientific discoveries or rigorous biblical scholarship will undermine faith is a tacit admission that faith is threatened by knowledge, because it is ultimately constructed on weak or faulty assumptions and, like the proverbial house of cards, needs to be "protected" from collapsing. (p. 21)"

"Everything we do for God will be the overflow of intimacy with God."

"For years I was deathly afraid of my own weaknesses, but when I closed my eyes and let myself be vulnerable to them it allowed miracles to take place. Miracles that were only alive when I accessed my BLIND faith."

"Could a body broken and blood spilled two thousand years ago restore my own damaged life?"

"Believe, my child. Faith is the food of survival."

"We will experience the life we have the faith to experience."

"The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion."

"In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity."

"It's better to dare to dream big and achieve half of your dreams than to dream small dreams and achieve all"

"[A] great deal of what we believe we do not know firsthand"

"Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the seperated."

"So many things which once had distressed or revolted him — the speeches and pronouncements of the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions, their refusal to allow the universe to move — all seemed to him now merely ridiculous, non-existent, compared with the majestic reality, the flood of energy, which now revealed itself to him: omnipresent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its development, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and unfailing in its protectiveness."

"Atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them -- and then they leap."

"A faith that does not result in activity of any kind is a dead faith; it is empty, worthless, insincere."

"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens"

"We are called to service in the kingdom of God. The Christian life is not about what you claim. It is about what you believe. True belief cannot be separated from what we do."