Good Infection

"Do not think that God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of the greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines upon it."

"God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome."

"Very often what God helps us towards is not the virtue itself, but just the act of always trying again.....it is wonderful what you can do when you have to."

"A thing will not really live unless it first dies.......Let the thrill go - let it die away- go on through the period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you try to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will get weaker and weaker, fewer and fewer, and you will bored and disillusioned."

"The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or you see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether."

"The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self - all your wishes and precautions - to Christ."

"Only one who tries to resist temptation knows how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of the wind by trying to talk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives into temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later."

"If you are right with Him, you will inevitably be right with all your fellow creatures, just as if all the spokes of a wheel are fitted rightly into the hub and the rim they are bound to be in the right positions to one another."

"Make know mistake, God says, if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. If you do not push me away, understand that I am going to see this job through. Whatever suffering it may cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death, whatever it costs Me, I will never rest, nor let you rest.........this I can do and will do."

"Lose your life, and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."

"Christ says, 'Give me all. I don't want so much of your time or so much of your money or so much of your work; I want you. I have not come to torment your natural self but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desire you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked - the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours'."

----- Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis