Because Jesus came to secure for us what we could never secure for ourselves, life doesn't have to be a tireless effort to establish ourselves, justify ourselves, validate ourselves.

Truth be told, most of us are faking our way through life. We pick only those battles we are sure to win, only those adventures we are sure to handle, only those beauties we are sure to rescue.

But strength alone though of the Muses bornIs like a fallen angel: trees uptorn,Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchersDelight it; for it feeds upon the burrsAnd thorns of life; forgetting the great endOf poesy, that it should be a friendTo soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.

Grace, too, is not an impersonal, metaphysical substance that trickles down to people through the sacraments, as in much popular Catholicism. Grace is an irreducibly personal category, first, in that it is a personal attitude of favor from God's heart, bringing us into relationship with him as our Savior, Friend, and Father.

God uses the flawed, the failures, and the imperfect to accomplish His perfect will.

It matters not what growth has been made in grace, how well experienced we may be in the spiritual life, or how eminent the position we have occupied in the Lord's service—when He withdraws His sustaining hand the madness which is in our hearts by nature at once asserts itself, gains the upper hand, and leads us into a course of folly.

They have an intimate connection with each other and a common relation to a single purpose, being, in fact, so many successive stages in the unfolding of the scheme of divine grace.

Why were not these men of faith delivered like the others? Or, why were not the others suffered to be killed like these? Why should God's power interpose and rescue some and not the others? Why allow Stephen to be stoned to death, and then deliver Peter from prison?

It is the eternal and absolute free favour of God, manifested in the vouchsafement of spiritual and eternal blessings to the guilty and the unworthy.

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.

When I retired first time around, injury had beaten me, and I hated that. Now I realise I'm no longer good enough. And I can handle that. It's fine that I'm not good enough.

The gospel is for the defeated, not the dominant.