I thought I would send some of the quotes that I used in my sermon this past Sunday in case you wanted to mull on them further.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Alone, alone, all alone.  Alone on the wide, wide sea.  And never a saint took pity on my soul in agony.  O Wedding guest!  This soul hath been alone on a wide, wide, sea; so lonely ‘twas the God Himself scarce seemed there to be.”

Abraham Lincoln: “I am the most miserable man living.  If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth.  To remain as I am is impossible.  I must die or be better.”

Alexander Whyte: “But, with all that, it is the terrible cry that come out of the chamber over the gate of Mahanian that makes the name of Absalom so well known & so full of the most terrible lessons to us.  ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son.  Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son!’  Yes, that is love, no doubt.  That is the love of a heart-broken father, no doubt.  But the pang of the cry, the innermost agony of the cry, the poisoned point of the dagger in that cry is remorse.  I neglected my son from a child.  With my own lusts I laid his very worst temptation right in his way.  It had been better if Absalom had never been born.  If he rebelled, who shall blame him?  I, David, drove him to rebellion.  It was his father’s hand that stabbed Absalom thru the heart.  O Absalom, my murdered son!”

C.S. Lewis: “Meanwhile, where is God?  This is one of the most disquieting symptoms.  When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms.  But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find?  A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.  After that, silence.  You may as well turn away.  The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.  There are no lights in the windows.  It might be an empty house.  Was it ever inhabited?  It seemed so once.  And that seeming was as strong as this.  What can this mean?  Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”

George Matheson: “O love that will not let me go; I rest my weary soul in Thee.  I give Thee back the life I owe, that in the ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be.”

The Lord to Helen Roseveare: “Helen, can you thank Me for trusting you with this experience, even if I never tell you why?”