Our task is to become our best selves. One of God’s greatest gifts to us is the joy of trying again, for no failure ever need be final.
Thomas S. Monson (via shannaelainestlaurent)
We get nearer to the Lord through music than perhaps through any other thing except prayer.
J. Reuben Clark Jr.

Litter makes me angry.

Seeing people litter kind of enrages me, actually. Especially if it’s someone driving a car with Christian stickers all over it. Seriously. You are aware that God gave you this planet. He made it just for you and me and the other people that you see here. This is a sacred place. And you’re just throwing your garbage all over it? Is that what you think of what God created for you? What about your other blessings? Is that how you think of them? SHOW SOME RESPECT!!!!! God made a wife for Adam called Eve. Do you think Adam threw trash at her?!?! *eye twitch* I think I’m going to start chasing people down to have this conversation with them. 

How I Gained a Testimony of Christ

Summarized in Verses I’d Never Read at That Point in Time

John 10:37-38
37 If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.
38 But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him. 

[so]

John 14:1
Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.  

John 15:7
If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you,
ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.

The goal of the first part is to align your will with His will. That’s how the second part works. 

Pray as someone who is not in control today. Pray as someone who is depending on Someone greater. It’s remarkably freeing.

(Source: bethkeunofficial)

(Source: unbrokenbygrace)

Forgiveness

I find that when I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing. Forgiveness says “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology, I will never hold it against you, and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.” Bus excusing says “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean to, you weren’t really to blame…”

Real forgiveness is looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it.

The Weight of Glory

Conversion

Mr. Wirt: In your book Surprised by Joy you remark that you were brought into the Faith kicking and struggling and resentful, with eyes darting in every direction looking for an escape. You suggest that you were compelled, as it were, to become a Christian. Do you feel that you made a decision at the time of your conversion?

Lewis: I would not put it that way. What I wrote in Surprised by Joy was that “before God closed in on my, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment wholly free of choice.” But I feel my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair. I was decided upon. I was glad afterwards at the way it came out, but at the moment what I heard was God saying, “Put down your gun and we’ll talk.”

Mr. Wirt: That sounds to me as if you came to a very definite point of decision.

Lewis: Well, I would say that the most deeply compelled action is also the freest action. By that I mean, no part of you is outside the action. It is a paradox. I expressed it in Surprised by Joy by saying that I chose, yet it really did not seem possible to do the opposite.

God in the Dock