Each heartfelt prayer, each Church meeting attended, each worthy friend, each righteous decision, each act of service perfomed all precede that goal of eternal life.
"Americans do not presume to equate God's purposes with any purpose of our own...."[Prayer] teaches us to trust, to accept that God's plan unfolds in his time, not our own.
We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.
God does not give heed to the ambitiousness of our prayers, because he is always ready to give to us his light, not a visible light but an intellectual and spiritual one; but we are not always ready to receive it when we turn aside and down to other things out of a desire for temporal things.
Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer.
Our tears are not enough. Our words and our prayers are not enough. If we really want to honor these twelve men and women, if we really want to be a country where we can go to work and go to school and walk our streets free from senseless violence, without so many lives being stolen by a bullet from a gun, then we're gonna have to change. We're gonna have to change.
A Time For Prayer "In times of war and not before, God and the soldier we adore. But in times of peace and all things righted, God is forgotten and the soldier slighted." -Rudyard Kipling
The prayers and supplications that Christ offered up were, joined with strong cries and tears, herein setting us example not only to pray, but to be fervent and importunate in prayer. How many dry prayers, how few wet ones, do we offer up to God!
What are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
I have had prayers answered - most strangely so sometimes - but I think our Heavenly Father's loving-kindness has been even more evident in what He has refused me.