Faith

"The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the ...moment."

"You can’t give somebody faith. They either got it or they don’t."

"The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the less I value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; andas the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,without asking too many questions."

"I guess that's where faith comes in, the faith of a child to believe in Santa, the faith of an adult to believe in God, maybe faith is what makes something real? Maybe Rose had believed enough to create her own afterlife, maybe that's the reward of faith..."

"So as I shivered, naked and damp, in front of the bathroom mirror, I raised my eyes skyward. "I hope we're still okay."I got no answer, but then, I didn't really expect one. Answer or not, it didn't matter. That's the thing about faith, I guess."

"Forgiveness without understanding is like faith without proof."

"Failure is a reality; we all fail at times, and it's painful when we do. But it's better to fail while striving for something wonderful, challenging, adventurous, and uncertain than to say, " I don't want to try because I may not succeed completely."

"When you SEE into the invisible, you will DARE to do the impossible!"

"Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith."

"Faith requires following the power of a whisper."

"Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. […] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29)."

"This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there's this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity."

"The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character."

"You asked the Holy Spirit for a miracle, and now that you’ve got one you’re trying to argue it away. People who don’t believe in miracles shouldn’t pray for them."

"[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions."

"For centuries the church has stood by while science picked away at religion bit by bit. Debunking miracles. Training the mind to overcome the heart. Condemning religion as the opiate of the masses. They denounce God as a hallucination - a delusional crutch for those too weak to accept that life is meaningless. I could not stand by while science presumed to harness the power of God himself! Proof, you say? Yes, proof of science's ignorance! What is wrong with the admission that something exists beyond our understanding? The day science substantiates God in a lab is the day people stop needing faith!"

"It is certain that an atom of goodness on the path of faith is never lost."

"We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world."

"What was the opposite of linkage blindness? What described being certain of something without any kind of evidence?."

"What I admire about the modern atheist is not at all his logic, but rather his gift of imagination. There will always be the cartoon versions of Christianity further perpetuated by the extremist atheists who do not possess the humility to ask real scholars and theologians its difficult questions. There is little doubt that the atheist has the bigger imagination: the first reason is due to his persistent caricatures of what constitutes a Christian; the second because of his belief that most of his questions are actually rhetorical. From this I can infer that, instead of laughing at one another (the Christian at modern atheist immaturity and the modern atheist at Christian stupidity), we would have a better chance at productivity laughing with one another as we all dumb down what we don't understand."