“It is no light matter to meet God after having denied Him all one’s life. I have turned often in thought and prayer to the events of that spring and summer, trying to understand something of who God is and what He is doing in my life. Coming to Him was only the beginning. I can point to a day and time and place of my conversion, and yet since then I have come to understand that He calls me to a fresh conversion every day.
I came to Him more broken than I realized. In the months that followed, I recognized the disorder in my life and learned that I must give every relationship, every desire, indeed everything in my heart, into God’s hands. I learned that obedience also means trust that His will is best, whether I understand it or not, and that the One who had made Himself known to me will not ever forsake or betray me.”
“It is sometimes easy to deliver an unhappy man from his present distress, but it is difficult to set him free from his past affliction. Only God can do it. And even the grace of God itself cannot cure the irremediably wounded nature here below. The glorified body of Christ bore the marks of the nail and spear.”
While reading George MacDonald’s Adela Cathcart, I ran across this quote and thought I’d share it:
“It is not the high summer alone that is God’s. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man’s winters are His – the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness – even ‘the winter of our discontent.”
That last phrase caught my ear. It sounded familiar so off to Google I ran to identify the source. I quickly learned two things from Wikipedia:
The phrase “winter of our discontent” originated in Shakespeare’s Play Richard III
Winter of our Discontent is the name of John Steinbeck’s last novel.
This paragraph was the beginning of a Christmas Day sermon by Mr. Armstrong, the curate. The rest of the sermon is worth reading but I won’t quote it here. As we approach the Christmas season, it is good to keep in mind that God is master of all of our circumstances. We can rejoice in Immanuel, God with us in the form of a baby that turned the world upside down.
I know that George MacDonald was an influence upon C. S. Lewis which is the primary reason I picked up the book. I’m excited to continue on, but thought I’d share this quote along the way.
“It is no light matter to meet God after having denied Him all one’s life. I have turned often in thought and prayer to the events of that spring and summer, trying to understand something of who God is and what He is doing in my life. Coming to Him was only the beginning. I can point to a day and time and place of my conversion, and yet since then I have come to understand that He calls me to a fresh conversion every day.
.
