This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly.

The truth that many people never understand is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more your suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things start to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly. That war is our wilderness.

Behind the walls of his isolation, his intelligence and his will, unimpaired, and not hampered in any essential way by the partial obstruction of some of his senses, were turned to God, and communed with God Who was with him and in him, and Who gave him, as I believe, light to understand and to make use of his suffering for his own good, and to perfect his soul.

This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. Merton, Thomas. Thoughts In Solitude (p. 8). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

PRAYER and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

You pray and suffer and hang on and give things up and hope and sweat, and the varying contours of the struggle work out the shape of your liberty. When it ends, and when you have a good habit to work with, do not forget the moments of the battle when you were wounded and disarmed and helpless. Do not forget that, for all your efforts, you only won because of God, Who did the fighting in you.

Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable.

There are times, beloved, when God will place you in the middle of trials—a hospital stay, rejection, a financial blow. He lets you hurt as others hurt, knowing that the way you handle it will be a testimony, that your response will show others that there's something awesomely different about you.

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.