no refusal in God

If he can give us his Son with so total a giving, what can he refuse us?
There is no refusal in God.
The refusals are ours.
Frank Sheed
From his book Knowing God

(a tulip tree moth who has seen better day…like me 😉 /Julie Cook/ 2021)

“We trust ourselves to a doctor because we suppose he knows his business.
He orders an operation which involves cutting away part of our body and we accept it.
We are grateful to him and pay him a large fee because we judge he
would not act as he does unless the remedy were necessary,
and we must rely on his skill.
Yet we are unwilling to treat God in the same way!
It looks as if we do not trust His wisdom and are afraid He cannot
do His job properly.
We allow ourselves to be operated on by a man who may easily
make a mistake—a mistake which may cost us our life—and protest when
God sets to work on us.
If we could see all He sees we would unhesitatingly wish all He wishes.”
Fr. Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure, p. 90
An Excerpt From
Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence

real hard truth found in life’s warfare

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth;
and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word,
to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God,
men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”
Pope St. John Paul II

(a wandering willet / Rosemary Beach / Julie Cook / 2020)

“We live in a fallen world.
We must therefore work out our destiny under the conditions created by sin.
Did we but realize this truth,
we would accept each of life’s trying changes in the same spirit in which
we accept the penance from the confessor.
Were we truly convinced that our hope of pardon, and consequently our salvation,
depends upon repentance, we would willingly undergo all the sufferings of life’s warfare.”
John A. Kane, p. 81
An Excerpt From
How to Make a Good Confession

Knowing God, following God

“There are two ways of knowing how good God is:
one is never to lose Him,
and the other is to lose Him and then to find Him.”
Archbishop Fulton Sheen

(the Conciergerie or Prison in Paris, France / Julie Cook / 2018)

“It is, then, in following the will of God,
in spite of all the difficulties that may arise both from within and from without,
in the constant offering of ourselves to God as the creatures of His hand to do and to be
what He would have us, in the surrender of one thing after another that comes between us
and Him and holds us back—-
it is in such acts that we unite ourselves with those glorious beings
who cast their crowns before the throne and with those unfallen creatures who have
never known what it is to have a wish or thought apart from the will of God.

Amongst those glorified saints there are, indeed, many whose wills were for a long time
in revolt against God’s will and who brought themselves at last into subjection,
many to whom the will of God here on earth meant the sacrifice of everything the heart
most loved, many to whom it meant the sacrifice of life itself.

But all that is past and over, and its fruits remain—-
the eternal life of oblation and union with God, where one will rules those countless
multitudes and binds them together and to God,
where each one of those countless millions lives his own complete and perfect life yet
never jars on any other, where each is perfect in itself and all together
compose one perfect whole—the Body of Christ.”
Fr. Basil Maturin, p. 47
An Excerpt From
Spiritual Guidelines for Souls Seeking God