For any who struggle to love,
I offer these thoughts
I found along the way
Grace and peace to you…dw
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Love and Justice
When Love leads, Justice follows.Judgement without compassion is the Devil’s work. Grace and peace to you… dw
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If it were the end of days
If it were the end of days,I’d say: Let’s do this,See what God begins next. Let’s do it together,See how God lovesfrom the very next beginning To the never-ending end. dw
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The whole truth
If love is not in the truth I tell I’m not telling the whole truth. dw
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A new page of pages
I recently added a new page to becomingflame.com – Pages on Love – a listing of all posts where love is a significant theme. You’ll see a variety of perspectives coming from all sorts of angles. I hope you enjoy the new page and find some measure of encouragement from the posts listed there. Don’t
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Self-isolation
Don’t love the world’s ways. Don’t love the world’s goods. Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father. Practically everything that goes on in the world—wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important—has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you from him. 1 John 2:15-17 –
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Love included
The “truth” that makes another man seem cheap hides another truth that we should never forget, and which would make him remain always worthy of honor in our sight. To destroy truth with truth under the pretext of being sincere is a very insincere way of telling a lie. — Thomas Merton, No Man Is
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Note to self
To do during COVID-19 or any other crisis or any other normal time: Love God with all I’ve got. Love every person that crosses my path. Love the people I don’t like and who don’t like me. Plead for God’s will to be done here as if this were heaven. Act and speak accordingly. Grace
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Our greatest danger
OUR GREATEST DANGER is not our sins but our indifference. We must be in love with God. It is not so much to change what we are doing, but our intention, our motive. Day, Dorothy. The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus (Plough Spiritual Guides: Backpack Classics) (p. 29). Plough Publishing House. Kindle
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The truth we tell
If love is not in the truth we tell, are we telling the whole truth? dw I read this from the apostle Paul today – he is coaching Timothy on how to be a good pastor. The whole point of what we’re urging is simply love—love uncontaminated by self-interest and counterfeit faith, a life open
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Love and ever more love
LOVE AND EVER MORE LOVE is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the
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Our lifelong fight
Our lifelong fight as a Christian is to get off the natural level and on the supernatural. Our lives must be a pure act of love, repeated many times over. Day, Dorothy. The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus (Plough Spiritual Guides: Backpack Classics) (p. 58). Plough Publishing House. Kindle Edition. Before we
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What he said…
Jesus didn’t say: Figure me out; He said – Follow me. He didn’t say: Get your doctrine right; He said – Judge not. He didn’t say: Puzzle out the End Times; He said – Stay awake. He didn’t say: Perfect yourselves; He said – Love me with all your heart. He didn’t say: Develop your
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I had lost something
Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to
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We have the greatest weapons
We have the greatest weapons in the world, greater than any hydrogen or atom bomb, and they are the weapons of poverty and prayer, fasting and alms, the reckless spending of ourselves in God’s service and for his poor. Without poverty we will not have learned love, and love, at the end, is the measure
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Locking ourselves in prison
It would be a sin to place any limit upon our hope in God. We must love Him without measure. All sin is rooted in the failure of love. All sin is a withdrawal of love from God, in order to love something else. Sin sets boundaries to our hope, and locks our love
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Infallibly fulfilled
All desires but one can fail. The only desire that is infallibly fulfilled is the desire to be loved by God. We cannot desire this efficaciously without at the same time desiring to love Him, and the desire to love Him is a desire that cannot fail. Merely by desiring to love Him, we
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Loving God
If I believe that He can love me, I must also believe that I can love Him. If I do not believe I can love Him, then I do not believe Him Who gave us the first commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and thy whole mind and
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Judging and Loving
It makes one unhappy to judge people and happy to love them. Day, Dorothy. The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus (Plough Spiritual Guides: Backpack Classics) (pp. 72-73). Plough Publishing House. Kindle Edition. I know there is an Accuser (poor Job didn’t know) its voice constantly in my ear always outraged (thought God
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Love and Fear
THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF FEAR, and I certainly pray to be delivered from the fear of my brother; I pray to grow in the love that casts out fear. To grow in love of God and man, and to live by this charity, that is the problem. We must love our enemy, not because
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Love that isn’t
To love another is to will what is really good for him. Such love must be based on truth. A love that sees no distinction between good and evil, but loves blindly merely for the sake of loving, is hatred, rather than love. To love blindly is to love selfishly, because the goal of
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Without my love
I must become convinced and penetrated by the realization that without my love for [another] they may perhaps not achieve the things God has willed for them. My love must be to them the “sacrament” of the mysterious and infinitely selfless love God has for them. The words I speak to them must be no
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Loving well
If we are going to love others at all, we must make up our minds to love them well. Otherwise our love is a delusion. We must first of all purify our love by renouncing the pleasure of loving as an end in itself. As long as pleasure is our end, we will be
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Love finds truth
For love must not only seek the truth in the lives of those around us; it must find it there. — Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
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First love the truth
It is clear, then, that to love others well we must first love the truth. The truth we must love in loving our brothers is the concrete destiny and sanctity that are willed for them by the love of God. The truth I must love in my brother is God Himself, living in him.
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Never safe from us
God himself is never safe from us…He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down…in the hungry people we do not have to feed…in the lonely people we do not have to comfort…in all the desperate human need of people everywhere that we are always free to turn our backs
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The Soul Behind My Sin
The Soul Behind My Sin Can you see the soul behind my sin? Will you see what God sees, deep within? Can you love the soul you see behind the mask that I call Me? Will you love what I can’t love, lift it to the throne of God? Can you see the soul I’m
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A very great gift
Thomas Merton writing about the gift that life is.
becoming flame 