trials Quotes

“It’s all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it’s not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?”

“The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch’s door when she is already away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”

“What seem to us a bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.”

“I changed what I could, and what I couldn’t, I endured.”

At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

“Sirius 1 was aborted after one hour. I guess you could call it a ‘failure,’ but I prefer the term ‘learning experience.‘”

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for.

“I stayed out of my stepfamily’s way as much as possible, and the longer I worked as a scullery maid, and the filthier I got, the less Hattie and Mum Olga tormented me. I think they gloried in my squalor as proof of my baseness.”

“We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hoped he’ll never have to use it.”

“And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.”

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

“It’s Mother who has to listen to [everyone in the village] laughing,” I pointed out. “I wish I could spare her that.” Father chewed the end of the brush’s wooden handle. “We have the easy part. All we have to do is fly. She has to live in the village.”

“No,” Father let out his breath in a rush. “No. I’m sick of having to deal with thieves and pimps and pushers. I’m sick of having to scrape and bow to men who live off the misery of their brothers and sisters. […] Don’t you see? We’re all tainted by it. As long as we keep quiet and let it go on, we’re as bad as they are. It eats at them; it eats at us.”

“JUROR #8: Look, this boy’s been kicked around all his life. You know - living in a slum, his mother dead since he was nine. He spent a year and a half in an orphanage while his father served a jail term for forgery. That’s not a very good head start. He had a pretty terrible sixteen years. I think maybe we owe him a few words. That’s all.”

“All thy vexations Were by my trials of thy love, and thou Hast strangely stood the test. Here, afore heaven, I ratify this my rich gift. ”

“Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.”

“He now felt glad at having suffered sorrow and trouble, because it enabled him to enjoy so much better all the pleasure and happiness around him; for the great swans swam round the new-comer, and stroked his neck with their beaks, as a welcome.”

There we are - the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life’s tribulations, but through it all clung to faith.

“like the rainbow after the rain joy will reveal itself after sorrow”

“I don’t even know anymore which home I miss. Which level of home. In Guatemala City I missed the mountains. My own language is not Spanish, did you know that?”

“Over the years, she told me the same story, except for the ending, which grew darker, casting long shadows into her life, and eventually into mine.”

“When an ancient temptation or trial becomes a feature in the culture, a way of life that is expected and encouraged, Christians have a stumbling block put before them that is hard to recognize for what it is, for it has been made into a monument, gilded with bronze and bathed in decorative lights.”

“Your life is not going to be easy, little Melody . . . If I could switch places with you, I’d do it in a heartbeat. You know that, don’t you?”

“Now that we had survived a major rebel attack together, it felt like these small bonds had sealed into something unbreakable.”

“‘It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.‘”

“But even if I had known I was getting such a bad husband, I had no choice, now or later. That was how backward families in the country were. We were always the last to give up stupid old-fashioned customs. In other cities already, a man could choose his own wife, with his parents’ permission of course. But we were cut off from this type of new thought. You never heard if ideas were better in another city, only if they were worse.”

“I mean talk. Never forget that God is your friend. And like all friends, He longs to hear what’s been happening in your life. Good or bad, whether it’s been full of sorrow or anger, and even when you’re questioning why terrible things have to happen. So I talk with him.”

“The people who had it hardest during the first few months were young couples like these, many of whom had married just before the evacuation began, in order not to be separated and sent to different camps. Our two rooms were crowded, but at least it was all in the family.”

“He knows it will be hard for me, Salva realized. He does not want to leave me there, but he has to go back and fight for our people.”

“E’en intolerable ills, Finding right issue, tend to naught but good.”

“Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him. As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him. We will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy.”

“The difficulties of life do not have to be unbearable. It is the way we look at them - through faith or unbelief - that makes them seem so. We must be convinced that our Father is full of love for us and that He only permits trials to come our way for our own good.”

“Yet one word Wipes out all score of tribulations—love.”

“I shut myself in because I’m lonely. Because I don’t want to face any more loneliness.”

“He also didn’t feel burdened by the thought that early parenthood would wreck his future plans . . . But in some unspoken way, he did sense that he was crossing a point of no return, that things were about to get complicated in a way he was unequipped to handle.”

“A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us. But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fail, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination.”

“The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says “journey before destination.” Some may call it a simple platitude, but it is far more. A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us.”

“I think God sometimes uses the completely inexplicable events in our lives to point us toward Him. We get to decide each time whether we will lean in toward what is unfolding and say yes or back away. The folks who were following Jesus in Galilee got to decide the same thing each day because there was no road map, no program, and no certainty. All they had was this person, an idea, and an invitation to come and see.”

“The war itself. How easy it was. How incredibly easy, even after all that we’d been through. Or maybe it was easy because of all we’d been through.”

“You will get through this. Not because you are strong but because your Brother is. Not because you are good but because your Brother is. Not because you are big but because your big Brother is the Prince, and he has a place prepared for you.”

“DO NOT RESIST OR RUN from the difficulties in your life. These problems are not random mistakes; they are hand-tailored blessings designed for your benefit and growth.”

“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”

“My story is not a pleasant one; it neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams–like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.”

“When God makes a way for you through your trials, it is an active, not passive, process.”

“Never give up prayer, and should you find dryness and difficulty, persevere in it for this very reason. God often desires to see what love your soul has, and love is not tried by ease and satisfaction.”

“But I will finish this story, recording updates on the trials and verdicts of all those involved. I promise I will be here until the very last word.”

“It’s always easier once you get to the destination to forget about the hills and winding roads you had to take to get there, but I knew that there was a lot of doubt and desire and hope all mixed together on the way.”

“What they had to say about Johnny’s bear was plenty. He was a trial and a tribulation to the whole valley.”

“Her great trial in life was her name, for she was a red-haired stoutish child and bore no resemblance to a lily of any kind or a rose unless it were a cabbage one, but, as she sometimes sighed, she supposed it might have been worse.”

“My friend Arthur, you have had a sore trial; but after, when you look back, you will see how it was necessary. You are now in the bitter waters, my child. By this time tomorrow you will, please God, have passed them, and have drunk of the sweet waters; so do not mourn overmuch. Till then I shall not ask you to forgive me.”

Seven years ago we all went through the flames; and the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured.

“Now, whether,” pursued Herbert, “he had used the child’s mother ill, or whether he had used the child’s mother well, Provis doesn’t say; but she had shared some four or five years of the wretched life he described to us at this fireside, and he seems to have felt pity for her, and forbearance towards her. Therefore, fearing he should be called upon to depose about this destroyed child, and so be the cause of her death, he hid himself (much as he grieved for the child), kept himself dark, as he says, out of the way and out of the trial, and was only vaguely talked of as a certain man called Abel, out of whom the jealousy arose. After the acquittal she disappeared, and thus he lost the child and the child’s mother.”