MacDonald: reduced to the best

Sunday, October 28, 2018
    Feast of Simon & Jude, Apostles
Meditation:
    We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
    —2 Corinthians 4:8-9 (NIV)
Quotation:
    Some natures will endure an immense amount of misery before they feel compelled to look there for help whence all help and healing comes. They cannot believe that there is verily an unseen, mysterious power, till the world and all that is in it has vanished in the smoke of despair; till cause and effect is nothing to the intellect, and possible glories have faded from the imagination; then, deprived of all that made life pleasant or hopeful, the immortal essence, lonely and wretched and unable to cease, looks up with its now unfettered and wakened instinct to the source of its own life—to the possible God who, notwithstanding all the improbabilities of His existence, may yet perhaps be, and may yet perhaps hear His wretched creature that calls. In this loneliness of despair, life must find The Life: for joy is gone, and life is all that is left; it is compelled to seek its source, its root, its eternal life. This alone remains a possible thin g. Strange condition of despair into which the Spirit of God drives a man—a condition in which the Best alone is the Possible!
    ... George MacDonald (1824-1905), David Elginbrod, vol. 2 [1863], Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1871, p. 155-156 (see the book)
    See also 2 Cor. 4:8-9; Ps. 12:1-2; 13; 46:1-3; 121:1-2; 130:1-4; Matt. 6:31-34; 2 Cor. 1:8-10; Phil. 4:11-13
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, at the end of my search is always You. CQOD    Blog    email    RSS
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