You breathe in the Love and the Goodness of God and you breathe out true gratitude. The Spirit of God courses through you like the very breath of Life, and if your chest would be light then you will be joyous and if your heart would be satisfied then you will be at peace divine.

Will of God. I commit myself to the Will of my Father. Yet what do I mean by that?

If I can’t enjoy today in the Lord, what makes me think that I can enjoy any other day? We give ourselves conditions of enjoying what we are given; we think that certain things must be the way we want them to be in order for us to receive our lives gratefully. But what do we know about true enjoyment? We do not know whether we will really be able to enjoy the day when it comes as we envision it. That day will have its own troubles… And the demons won’t leave us alone on that day just as they do not cease to distract us now. Today!, be glad and praise the Lord! Bless His Holy Name and bless the world! When the Love of God fills your heart, gladness will be almost as if an afterthought. Yet a mere speck of such gladness will be as if heaven itself to those who do not now feel the Love of God near their hearts.

Prayer is true to the degree to which the heart is spent. Do you spend your heart in earnest in prayer to the Father? The form of prayer might matter less. But the oneness of heart in prayer is essential in true prayer. Seek the Lord in such things. Even in prayer we require our Father’s help.

Merton says our intelligence, strength, and prudence, and would’ve said of probably other things besides, that they are means that God has given us to find our ways to Him. This is true. Different combinations of these things are given to us individually, yet all things considered every one of us is given enough to obtain this End without lack. 

Recognition and true confession of one’s sins is the beginning of an agreement with God. If we are to have God’s way, we must learn to see the truth about ourselves. If we cannot accept the truth about ourselves, there can be no abiding change towards heaven. 

Systemicity is an ambition that is too unwieldy to be useful in our inquiries into the truth of things. Not that it is without value at all; it can be one of the constraints. But there are more important things to look out for. If we invert or mess up the relative values of different aspects of our truth-seeking activity, we won’t get very far.

A paint spatula spreading a knob of green or blue paint. It was a very close up vision. I asked God what this was about. He said I was trying to look too closely at what is going on. I can’t see the whole picture like this. He said I look at my own life in a similar way. 

Be free in My Love. That is what I want you to be; that is where I want you to be. You are not bound like a slave. Let My Love guide you into all things. He said.

When I am in the midst of God’s Love, all things are available to me. I am not constrained by anything and I can do what my heart freely desires because my heart is one with the Love of the Father. All that I do is very good before the sight of God; all that I do is an expression of His Love. I have narrowed my heart’s desires to match the heart of God, but really it is no narrowing at all! For the Love of God covers all things, is for the good of all things, penetrates all things, surrounds all things—He is all in all! Amen.

He will make me understand what He desires me to understand. I will have His portion.

God is essentially Love in that nothing that He does is apart from His Love. What is of God is of Love.

My strongest and central desire is God. I want God. Everything else gets a side desire. At least consciously I viciously cut down and eliminate what is not essential to my desire for God. What I overlook and am blinded to by pride or sin, God burns up with His jealous fire. He purifies me. And what remains will be a pure and undivided Love of God for God.

Only one Will is truly free. Our wills are capable of being free and they will only truly be free when they are bound to the one Will that is truly free. God’s Will is Love. We may subordinate our wills to His Love partially. So we may exercise our free will sometimes when we do. Complete and whole exercise of free will is complete and whole submission to the Will of God—that is, His Love. 

The Laughter of the Lord is His divine Light. Yesterday I heard His Laughter in prayer. His Laughter is Power. His Laughter proceeded to me like waves of light, bending all His surrounding. Then He laughed from within me, and His Laughter came forth from me. Then I laughed; I joined Him in His Laughter. He took light of all my concerns. He laughs because His Love overcame all.

I desire you to choose Me with your freedom. I desire that you would seek Me with your freedom. I desire you to choose Me above all in the freedom I give to you.

I am being emptied out—so that God can fill me with Himself. How awesome is His work! All that is unworthy of Him will be burned up. Only what is truly pure and holy will remain. The Lord has done it! Who can oppose it?

I think I am blessed in that I recognize the divine in small and ordinary things. I see God in most all things, and seeing God makes man profoundly happy.

I have a craving for understanding and knowledge. But I must let this go. Then, I will know without being able to show myself as knowing.

Perfect Peace is unqualified Peace. It is Peace in all things, for the God of Peace, who is with us in the very depth of our souls where we cannot be separated from Him, is the only Reality we fix our gaze upon and is the only Reality that is of any real importance to us. You hear the Voice of God, and it only matters to you that you have done the Will of God. How matters unfold as the result of your obedience is hidden in the sovereign workings of God. If God reveals well to you, He has meant to do so. If not, then He has also meant to do so. There are no accidents in the realm of the spirit. What is done is what is intended. It is the portion of a blessed man to be satisfied in knowing that one has done the Will of God. 

Our freedom is not without direction. Our freedom is not absolutely unbiased. Our freedom is charged—it already comes with a bent, a directionality towards God’s Love. It has a bent to incline towards making decisions that grasp for Heaven, such that our freedom feels most natural and comfortable when good decisions are made. Some choices bring about true rest in our souls. And we are at peace. Peace is a mark of wholeness. Freedom, when expended correctly along how it was designed to be expended, will be accompanied by deep peace and satisfaction that denote a certain wholeness within one’s soul. There is a sense of fulfillment and pervasive happiness that radiate out from within one’s heart.

Will you let My Life take over you even when the world has rejected you? So that you will move and have your being in My Life alone? And the world will know My Life through you.

What I learn in times of wretched desperation and great pain seem to be things that cannot be learned except in them. Somehow the things that I learn are made necessary by the fact that I suffer precisely in those ways. It is as if I am perfected by means of suffering which my imperfection produced and whose lessons redeem my imperfection for good.

I am glad that the life of God is in me—and not just that, but that it is maturing to fullness. O God I love You. The more You take over me, the more I am swallowed up by Your Love.

God can’t be figured out at a distance. One does not come to know God through observation. Coming to know something through observation involves some sort of criterion of verification that provides interpretation/assessment of data in relation to the expectation of outcome that aligns with an evaluator’s understanding of what it is for an outcome to be verifying or meaningful–or in the case of God, God-revealing. But without at least already having some partial understanding of God, how would anyone know what the right criterion is supposed to be? You do not know what to look out for so to speak. The criteria adoption implies concession to the usefulness of the criteria for making correct judgments about what one applies the criteria to. In giving certain belief-guiding weight to the criteria that you use, you already give yourself to the momenta and biases inherent in them. If one were to entertain the thought that God exists, one cannot come to test such a hypothesis without giving oneself to God. And one will often find that those who claim to know something about God will speak to that effect.

More and more God opens my eyes. And I see clearly. Hallelujah! Amen.

It is the greatest pleasure of the Son to do the Father’s Will. For the Father is Love and the Son is Love and the Spirit is Love. And there is Oneness in Love that seeks the supreme Good in all things.

From God’s perspective, miracles are not any more extraordinary than our run of the mill events. We operate with ideas of normality that are conditioned by present constraints of the world that God Himself set in place. One way or another we form a sense of normality based on recurring elements in our experiences. And we collectively form models that are consistent over as many members of experiencers as possible, and we name them theories of the world.

One question is when God set up the world whether He meant what we typically consider as miracles to be more regular aspects of our experiences or not. Is it that we simply lost touch with the spiritual and the miraculous when they were meant to be more commonplace? Alternative is that miracles are meant to be exceptions to the commonplace experiences that form our expectations of normality. They are signs of the divine—they indicate and point towards things that do not strictly belong to the world that is ordinarily consigned to us. If this, then God did not mean the miracles to be somehow regularly or predictably connected to us—either as within our normal domain of abilities or powers, or as by some other way.

Hardship too is a gift from God if we allow ourselves enough time for our hearts to be formed in such a way as to receive it with glad thankfulness. Then our hearts become bigger. Then our hearts become capable of embracing harsher realities with tenderness and affection. Our teary eyes will be a sign of both the pain we bear and the longing for the fullness of the Love of God that will embrace all things and make them truly good.

Surely we miss the goodness in all things and count only what appears as ill to us.

There is one demand of life: that we should live it with a certain light-heartedness, full of the laughter of the Lord. Nothing is so serious that we should be incapable of being free from it. We shouldn’t be enslaved by anything for in everything we are to live as the Lord lives in us. We are to be deeply pleased in life–we can’t force this of course; when our hearts are satisfied, when we see as the Lord sees, praise will spill out from our hearts and will be worn on our countenance.

The secrets of the hearts of men are hidden–they are like dark and ominous water whose presence you might vaguely feel but whose exact movements are hidden from the light of men’s understanding. But we can feel that they sway and move, and they sway and move us with the weight of a moving water.

Jesus was standing like a giant and I was like an ant before Him. I was trying to speak to Him and was shouting, wondering if He could hear me. I wanted to know if He could hear me. Then a silver coin fell down from Him and though the coin was bigger than me I was able to catch it with my arms lifted above my head. Then more coins dropped from above and many gold coins and some silver coins were stacked on top of the first silver coin, and many other treasures were piled on top, and I was going away carrying many things.

If we endure, God gives us a timely word to keep us on His path.

When I truly enjoyed what I did when I was alone, what I cared about were close to my sphere of activity. Things beside could be otherwise and that they could be different made no difference to me. I was happy. I was content. 

All of a sudden I felt that the Lord was here with me. Layers of light descended upon the place where I was, and it was as if the trees and the flowers around me became more alive. The ground became holy. And the wind fresh with His Spirit. The air was thick, and my heart beat a knowing and excited beat. I could barely move, and all my senses seemed to have opened themselves to all that was happening around me. And my being gave a holy shudder and praised God who was with me.

Jesus will raise up the one who believes in Him on the last day. He Himself will do it. Amen!

I was so proud, again and again. I looked to myself and thought I deserved much. But the gracious Lord revealed His truth to me. And now I will be satisfied with whatever the Lord deems is proper to me. I am His vessel–His instrument to be used according to His good pleasure. Glorify Thy Name oh God. Amen.

Church met for national prayer day. I asked God if I should pray for myself or others. He said others. I asked who. And He answered president Harris. I thought to myself she isn’t a president. God said He will use her as an instrument for His purposes. I was told to pray for her safety and for her to be ready to be used by God. I prayed for president Kamala Harris.

    I asked God for a vision. He showed me a messed up stapler. It produced messed up staples. I asked God what this was about. He told me this generation is like the broken stapler He showed me. It is supposed to put together the generation before and the time that is to come. But it doesn’t understand that the bond that it produces is supposed to be not a permanent bond. Like a staple, it has its limited function to hold things for a time, but because it doesn’t understand its transient function it is broken and cannot even hold in the intended limited capacity. Its staples are all crooked and do not hold things well together, and they fall apart.

Our ideas of freedom, like many things, are bundles of relevant ideas, with each contributing idea having varying degrees of relevance in giving sense to what freedom means for each of us and collectively.

If we properly understand external constraints and become united in our wills for our choices to be harmoniously coordinated such that one decision is never violated by the decision of another, then such would be the condition of perfect exercise of freedom for all. If our deepest goals and desires become one and we recognize that they are aligned with one another, then we each find our part for a common goal and rejoice to see each other’s fruit because we see its purpose in the ultimate goal we share. Our strivings do not conflict since our goals align. The greatest Will to be accounted for is God’s Will. We subordinate our wills first of all to His. External constraints are parts of God’s Will for us. 

There are some understandings that can only be had in close walking with the Lord. Many of our “Why’s” to the Lord find their answer there.

Writing about spiritual things involves withdrawing oneself from the experiences of the reality of spiritual things. You sort of take a step back and then you write. When you are taken up wholly by the Lord, you cannot write anything. All attention to God. Writing only detracts. So the deepest of spiritual experiences are either not written at all or written only as if a distant memory or a longing reflection. They can’t be written well enough anyways—or described in a way that is ever fair to the reality of the experience in full. It is always only a knowing nod, pointed to rather than described for those who experienced it themselves.

The one who remains faithful to the end, he it is who will be with the Lord forever. Amen.

Job didn’t kill himself. In all his complaints, he sought the Lord. He believed that God would answer. And God has answered Job, and Job was satisfied.

Purposeless living is unendurable for man. This is because whether people recognize or not, all their actions are reflections of their true values. A purpose for life for an individual is a function of some interplay between values of different importance for that individual. The sense of loss of purpose in life indicates loss of values for that individual–what used to shine with bright glory in life, what used to drive him to offer his life on the altar before God, has become stale and flat.

Not many are truly living. Without the true and living inner fire, one lives only by duty, convention, and momentum of the life that one used to live.

You cannot come to know the Will of God in the safety of the world.

You cannot come to know the Will of God without breaking the rules that bind you to the ways of the world. Breaking of rules always comes at a cost. The world will punish you, and you will be called to make a choice–whether to seek God or to remain as you are.

I am richly given–more richly given than most. But what I am given cannot be seen by others unless they too have it. My heart is open to the world of God and the whole world is given to me as a gift. Others who judge me poor only judge me so because they can’t help but count in more or less the same way as the world counts. In many ways I am lowly. Yet for what I see, I am more blessed than most–for I see God, and His Glory fills me.

God often speaks to us so subtly, so quietly that if we would not pay attention, if we would not focus with our whole being, we would miss Him. Even what He says is indiscernible to our human minds, but somehow our spirit understands–our spirit receives from God what He means to give to us in that moment.

Could it be that God Himself is suffering by the separation we cause by all our sins? God loves us as if we were Himself–which is a Love infinitely greater than any love we could imagine to have for ourselves. Any degree of separation from or rejection of His Love, He suffers through. He bears all our sins, but not only so! He suffers more deeply from our sins than we could ever suffer from their consequences–for He loves us more than we love ourselves. If we suffer for our sins, He suffers more–somewhat as a mother would for her suffering child. God loves us and He bears the suffering of His Love because He loves; because He is Love. Perhaps hell is each of us finally coming to taste this suffering of Love. What was hidden from us by a multitude of limitations–limitations of grace and mercy–may finally be revealed to us, and we would suffer as God suffers, if we find ourselves at the entrance of eternity unable to love God as He loves us. If the pain of divine separation is not overcome by the Love of God, such is eternal suffering, such may be hell.

As people get older and more well connected to a community of people in which they see value, there seems to come an inordinate and disproportionate amount of care for good reputation–as if their fate and happiness and the well-being of their future depended on good reputation. Care for reputation is a social value. It has its roots in the perfectly legitimate desire to be known truly by others. But the common and vile form that it takes in most people is to be considered well by others whether in truth or not. 

There are some for whom if Heaven were to be revealed to them as they are now they would at once be undone at the perceived purity of all that is beside themselves and the all-consuming Love’s demand upon them. They would not be able to escape from judging eternal death upon themselves–because they have already judged impurity upon themselves all the time before.

Fruits of love cannot be obtained by simply obliging to the duty to love. In fact one cannot love in truth at all by merely practicing the forms of love. Love proceeds from the heart, and more importantly love proceeds from God. One can only ride the current of God’s Love towards an individual, recognize for oneself the goodness in it, and will the same love towards the individual in the awareness of its goodness–though this awareness need not be a conscious recognition of seeing the goodness to be about God’s Love at all.

The Lord will fill up what I give away in His Love, and more! When I have nothing, I will have the Lord.

There is a sort of high intelligence that seems well correlated with good or some sense of wholeness of character. As if understanding good things in the world in their proper places and being formed by them lend oneself well to understand the world truly more effortlessly. The order of things may even perhaps be that in having been formed by the good things in the world properly, one gains a sort of good intuition for understanding good things in the world. In either case, understanding good things properly seems to be well correlated with some variety of high intelligence.

Clearsightedness is a product of an uprightness of the heart. It is a matter of spiritual foresight that counts only what really matters in the eyes of God. Then your life will be as you believe in the Spirit. Then faith brings forth the reality of God’s truth. Then the life that you see before you is as if already obtained, as if already true. And you walk into it fully aware of your destiny in God. And you are not shaken in God’s promise for you. Then your heart is full and you will walk in the Light into eternity.

I try to be precise about my experiences. Existing words that are typically associated with experiences tend to lose meaning in translation through the idiosyncrasies of individual interpreters. Everyone interprets out of his own life–the contents of one’s own life constitute the material limit of understanding and constrain the interpretation of what is said.

What are the real consequences of failing to speak the truth? There are deep and abiding consequences for it, but we neither think much of it in practice nor in theory. We think it permissible that less than the most lucent truth in us should be the medium through which we choose to form others’ thoughts and ideas. Unbeknownst to us, we look after what comes out of us; they form our inner selves just as much as they serve as materials to form others’ inner persons. There is always some truth in us to tell; truth that seeks to make itself known–and in being known, be known to be beautiful and good. But our hearts are home to more than the purest of truth. Lies surrounding the truth that seeks to shine forth from within us speak to us of multitude of reasons to be afraid to live and move by the truth.

Spirit is free and light and is capable of being truly sincere when inessentials with regards to eternal matters are shed and thus do not cling to every intention to speak and act. Spirit becomes capable of seeing straight through what matters for eternal life and what matters not–it becomes clearsighted.

We don’t know what misery it is to think that things can only be a specific way and no other, and come to see that things do not unfold as they must. What anxiety! But the truth is that often more than one way is good and beautiful in the sight of God, and what matters is that in the end our hearts are wholly given unto God through whichever way we have taken.

The less cannot judge the more about the things that constitute the difference between them. The less has too little, so to speak, to judge truly about what it’s missing in relation to the more.

Has God changed since when He gave His freedom to us, potential sinners? We dispute the aptness of such a decision as if God has done one thing for which we may find fault. We ask, “Why would God make us free and thus possibly evil?” But God hasn’t changed. God doesn’t give less of what is good on account of the recipient’s weaknesses. God doesn’t give in fear. God gives in His Love (as His Love is true giving of Himself). And He knows by His Love that His giving is and will be Good. He even now gives His power and authority to us, not just potential but in fact sinners, still perfectly capable of extravagant failures, so that by His Goodness we may do good that is beyond ourselves. What good could we do apart from God’s freedom? When we were abject sinners, God didn’t see it beneath Himself to give to us. And His giving has changed us to be very children of God. He didn’t withhold on account of our sinfulness. God has not changed. He gives. And His giving saves us. His giving is perfect and is for perfection.

Forms of society–we care too much for them.

It is painful to be less than you are. Being small and less than the whole of yourself is not unaccompanied by suffering of the soul. I thought if I could be nothing, then in virtue of being nothing I would be capable of suffering less–not even notice that I suffer. But that wasn’t the case. You feel the empty space, you feel the presence of the empty space, and there is nothing you can do. The empty space is somehow deathly suffocating yet unending and unyielding. There is no true remedy to suffering except to fill up the measure of your being.

God is beyond all apprehension. This means that even our spiritual experiences of Him, our inner feelings of His presence, are only approximations of His Otherness–closer to the truth than all other experiences of the common kind, yet only relative approximations still. Spiritual experiences are holy and alien from other ordinary experiences, in virtue of which they indicate God’s presence to us. They are still not the Center of God’s Love, for only God Himself is there.

When we try to be precise about matters pertaining to God, we quickly find that there exists a threshold of precision beyond which precision and consistency seem to be at odds with one another. Precision is essentially about the meanings of concepts–their truth conditions, what they entail, how they play with other concepts, and so on; we want to understand more finely or more concretely how we might relate other concepts to them. These are concerns for coherence and demarcation that are bound by the totality of one’s experiences. The overall picture is shaped and thus constrained by some amalgamation of total inputs. But we don’t even take our own totality into account when we try to be clear about our ideas of God, let alone some proper totality (if any but God Himself) necessary for such an endeavor. 

For some, there is need even to pour their intention into speaking–even to formulate words in a particular way.

You can speak the truth and yet still be a liar. In order to be truthful–full of truth–you must speak the truth for truth. But many speak the truth for themselves. If you speak the truth for yourself, then the truth that you speak becomes only an instrument for another goal, a servant to another master. True things to say then only become things you use. You cannot cease to be a liar only by merely conforming outward appearances. You must speak the truth that wells up from deep within you. If it seems to ruin you to say it, so be it! It may indeed ruin you as you are now. Yet somehow, you will find that this truth is full of love even in tearing down. And if you give yourself to it, then at last you will learn to speak the truth that is love–you will speak the truth that truly leads to eternal life.

It seems that there is a class of people for whom they, each of their own, seem to themselves to be the most intelligent. Most of these people lie to themselves that they have such a belief in them, and speak openly against the thought, or those who profess it, or those who act in its full conviction. But in their denial, they are simply being insecure; they notice only too well, if only subconsciously, that exposing such belief is not advantageous to them. They are acting and speaking out of duplicity, perhaps hidden even from their own self-perception. In their heart of hearts, they believe themselves to be more intelligent than everyone around them. 

There is no deep understanding of any sin or evil or vile inner ugliness except in being the very sinner yourself. You understand the ins and outs of a sin or some wretched condition because it is an intimate reality which you faced within you. You do not betray thorough knowledge of some sin without at the same time confessing your own complicity in it. You say things as if to separate yourself from it somehow, yet you only reveal your identity in it.

One of my greatest physical pleasures is when I feel my body to be piping hot, a cool breeze comes over me and gently licks the heat off of me. It gives me the good chills. I can close my eyes and just embrace it.

If I do nothing and give myself to doing nothing I might as well just die. It seems I can’t live but do what my current nature demands. I must think and write, and I cannot live otherwise.

It seems to me that people move so swiftly compared to me. People have clear goals, and their lives are well-defined in relation to those goals. I don’t know if I have goals as they do. Even if it can be said that I do, I don’t know if they are as clear for me as they seem to be for others.

Both Wittgenstein and Dostoevsky mention courage as being required for originality. Is the idea something like this: to speak what is contrary to what is of common opinion or acceptance requires one to risk rejection and even ridicule? And not only to simply risk but rather even to expect it as the necessary initial response?

There are those who are able to somehow create great beauty in spite of what they have or do not have. And the limitation spans not just the external matters; even if they were lacking in skill or technique, even if their constitution were lacking in some way, it does not matter. They bring forth, and what they bring forth is great–incommensurably great and beautiful somehow. It’s almost as if they intuit the beauty first and make things work for it–and every set of things can be made to work for it in their eyes! In their creation, nothing is wasted. What may be considered a blemish and a fault in another context is no blemish in the thing created. They are able to make good of it. They are able to make it contribute for the good of the whole in such a way that the supposed fault is dissolved and is redefined in relation to the beautiful whole. They make it such that now “the fault” is necessary for the beauty of the whole–without it the whole would be incomplete.

Truth. Truth is beautiful.

Chatter of Heaven. Laughter of Heaven.

Who can live by the Word of the Lord alone?

Heaven’s light comes down softly upon our heads like a blanket. It covers our heads and our shoulders. Heaven’s light is like something that we can touch. But it is not like a blanket. Its surrounding has density, as if wading through water. It is thick and it resounds with Life! Life eternal is very much the fabric of Heaven’s light. And Heaven’s Light comes from our God, and is our God. So He surrounds us as Light, as eternal Life.

What does it mean to rejoice in the Lord than to brighten your heart in being mindful of Him? Still, there is greater mystery to this than can be said.

Character building is deeply tied up with suffering, so much so that if there be no suffering in one’s life there is also no growth in character. 

Who is God? What is God? Even if we accept the Scriptures as revealing some truths about God, it isn’t as if everything that we can ever know about God is contained in them. Limitation is twofold anyways. We almost always get out less than what we can from whatever truths that the Scriptures do in fact reveal about God. In some sense, even in knowing Him truly, we still only know Him piecemeal. Perhaps in His grace, He makes it the case that we have enough to come to know what we must know about Him–the piecemeal that we know are not trivial by God’s design. I think this is true. And maybe this is enough. Certainly if it is true that God makes it the case, then it is enough. It would still be true, however, that there will be much about God than what we can now know.

Different concepts can be said to be fitting of God in different ways. Like all concepts, they are heuristic tools for us finite creatures to eliminate distractions and to narrow in on more of a better facsimile of the reality of God. This helps us orient ourselves to God more rightly, thus helping us to be formed by the very Truth of God That proceeds from Him alone.

In our relationship to God, there exists a logistical conundrum. Practices we employ to address our legitimate need to be securely attached to God are often the source of our attachment being less than wholly true. We must be filled by the Spirit of God in our every intent and every thought and movement, yet many of our disciplines that help us keep near the vicinity of the ways of God’s Kingdom lead us to us having fake faith.

Nothing is good enough to be said outright—except the truth of God!

Once sparked, the love of Christ does not go away from within one’s heart.

When I sin, I sometimes get a premonition about a punishment from God. And there is a sad fearfulness associated with the premonition. I asked God why He would punish me. I understood that sins have consequences. But when I feared for some retribution in my heart, what did it matter what I understood or did not understand? I also understood that God is not like us for whom punishment often turns out to be no more than a means of satisfying our vengeful hearts—a mere tool of revenge, often of petty, small and bitter origin. God did answer my question however. He said how will I learn if there is no punishment? How will you all learn if there is no punishment? That did not sound like a very good answer. But something deeper was shown to me. Sin has its ‘natural’ corresponding fruit—which we sometimes perceive ourselves to experience as punishment. This was along the natural order of the world—an order of the world in which genuine goodness exists, which goodness thus shines into existence genuine badness. Good things produced good fruits and bad things produced bad fruits. And an important part, an unavoidable part of what it meant for something to be a good thing was for it to produce further good fruits. And likewise for sins; what it is for something to be a sin included its ‘punishing’ consequences—consequences borne directly out of the sin committed. If I correctly foresee the consequences of my own sins and in fear I ask God to forgive me, what I may be really intending to ask Him is to take away the apprehended ‘punishment’, to take away my sin’s consequences. Perhaps God sees that suffering through the consequences of sin may prove to have a greater saving effect on me than to merely spare me the rod. Maybe I am to learn that sin really is costly, even mortally so, and I am to learn this lesson lest I perish in the increasing abundance of sin away from the goodness of the world God created and the very Goodness of God that we are to come to know through the world. If God were to properly punish us, the punishing effects would lie outside the natural consequences of the sin. This may happen too. God may even stoop to punish us, if He deems it necessary to save our souls somehow in doing so. But in some sense, God cannot deliver us from suffering the consequences of our own sins. We cannot avoid experiencing what makes sin sin. 

There is nothing greater than for man to know God! For to know Him is to love Him. For us to love Him is to be loved by Him.

There is one fact about God that is drastically at odds with our worldly intuition and instinct: the more we have Him, the more we want to share Him with others; the better He appears to us, the more we’d like for others to have what we have.

Sometimes the peace of God only comes when you are fully resigned to let things be as God wills them, no matter what they may be. We lose our anxious desires this way. And we become free and at peace.

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God marks the character of genuine and intimate first encounter with the One Who is Holy, Whose Holiness does not tolerate the mortal evil in us. Is the fear of God transient? Love casts out all fear! Even the fear of God? But let the fearers of God rejoice! We lament our sins and strive towards God’s Holiness in doing so.

With the loss of simple poverty in one’s life, you lose the ability to know how to be simply happy. For with the loss of poverty you introduce wealth-bound complexity into your life, and with such complexity there come many anxieties. Unless you are ready at every occasion to fully give up all that you have–which is impossible unless you already live as if nothing you have is truly yours–what happens to those complexities make a genuine difference to your happiness. 

Surely there is a way to receive richly from the Lord!

The Lord fortifies the heart of man. He protects him from the rear. He puts an iron covering over him. But the man doesn’t see it. His eyes are fixed forward.

Sometimes there is not much more that is required of us than to face the truth and speak it and accept whatever comes as a result of having stood by the truth. In fact, that is the only real way to live. Saints are those who learn by experience that the life that comes out of it is full of the joy and the peace of God. But many don’t see how being resigned to live by the truth can be truly good for them. 

God’s laughter has weight. It is heavy. God Himself joyously laughs and He is not bound by anything. But His laughter pushes aside–His laughter does not leave room enough for fleeting things of this world. The aftermath of His laughter is that what remains is worthy of His joy.

The truth that comes from Above comes with a sort of light about it. It has its own halo. There is a sensation of things becoming brighter within you, which sensation is accompanied by warmth. 

Knowledge and understanding lead to an experience of a fuller, richer world.

When the rain is in full force, the ground is angrily roaring but the plants are still. Not a single branch stirs. They are receiving life from above! Blessing the Lord in thankful stillness. Don’t the plants seem more alive after the rain has passed!