Doubting Thomas

A few clips from the last week:

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear." - Mother Teresa (the last years of her life Mother Teresa struggled with serious doubts. She viewed herself as relating with the suffering of Christ. I bought this week the song Doubting Thomas by Nickel Creek. I think what hurts and what we desire is the same thing: to be cared for. I want that too. We ask over and over again--to make sure--can I trust You, Lord? There are times that we have found trust very easy. There has been a time when it was pleasurable. We call those springtime and we call our despair the winter. One is bright with life and one is bleak, sapping, dull. What will bring us back to vitality? And we stand forcibly, painfully, resiliently still beside Thomas, "I will not believe unless...." What will bring us to belief again? Our older ages do not always give us better answers than the child. I was eager hearted as a child. But what does it mean like to "become like one of these" children? I think it means that we are more willing to love and be loved. Simple. It does not mean that we laugh with absurd naivete at the question when they come, but I think that we must trust in one who is loving. I am convinced that we often do not feel loved, not because we are not being loved, but because we do not know how to receive love. I can feel such obligation to expend myself, while forgetting that all of this can be done--even to the point of losing my own life--without love. Love! Let there be no fear or haze. God is love. A friend once told me as I labored over a philosophy paper about the nature of love that the answer was simple: God is love. We have grown older now and find that harder to understand, harder to believe. But love has not grown old, it has not changed. "O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee. I give Thee back the life I owe, that in Thine ocean depths its flow, may richer fuller be....")

"We have been trying to apply machine age methods to our relationship with God...Our thought habits are those of the scientist not of the worshipper. We are more likely to explain than to adore." - Tozer

"There never was a horse that couldn't be rode; there never was a man that couldn't be throwed." - Texas Bix Bender in Don't Squat With Yer Spurs On!

"Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides You. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." - Psalm 73