Graham's Blog

October 28, 2017

Quotables - Charles Spurgeon

If you have to give a carnival to get people to come to church, then you will have to keep giving carnivals to keep them coming back.

- Charles Spurgeon

"What does mental illness actually look like and feel like? How is depression different from just feeling sad or discouraged or blue? I'm not the only one, certainly, to try to describe it. In his award-winning book Darkness Visible, William Styron writes:

'The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying - or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity - but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.' "

Darkness Is My Only Companion - Kathryn Greene-McCreight, pg 39

"Depression meant that every breath, every thought, every moment of consciousness ached, throbbed, stung."

Darkness Is My Only Companion - Kathryn Greene-McCreight, pg 55

July 07, 2017

Mark on a Zip Line

Mark in the Hamster Ball

Quotables - Jonathan Edwards

Men that have their spirits heated and enraged and rising in bitter resentment when they are injured act as if they thought some strange thing had happened to them. Whereas they are very foolish in so thinking for it is no strange thing at all but only what was to be expected in a world like this. They therefore do not act wisely that allow their spirits to be ruffled by the injuries they suffer.

As love to God prevails, it tends to set persons above human injuries, in this sense, that the more they love God the more they will place all their happiness in him. They will look to God as their all and seek their happiness in portion in his favor, and thus not in the allotments of his providence alone. The more they love God, the less they set their hearts on their worldly interests, which are all that their enemies can touch.