#affliction

Conversion can also occur among those who already have the faith. Christians will become real Christians, with less façade and more foundation. Catastrophe will divide them from the world, force them to declare their basic loyalties; it will revive shepherds who shepherd rather than administrate, reverse the proportion of saints and scholars in favor of saints, create more reapers for the harvest, more pillars of fire for the lukewarm; it will make the rich see that real wealth is in the service of the needy; and, above all else, it will make the glory of Christ’s Cross shine out in a love of the brethren for one another as true and loyal sons of God. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#hardship #suffering #faith

Though all afflictions are evils in themselves, yet they are good for us, because they discover to us our disease and tend to our cure. ↗

— David Viscott

#because #cure #discover #disease #evils

Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions. ↗

— William Arthur Ward

#breeds #either #humanity #makes #tolerates

The Lord's mercy often rides to the door of our hearts on the black horse of affliction. Jesus uses the whole range of our experiences to wean us from earth and woo us to Heaven. ↗

— Charles H. Spurgeon

#distress #jesus #pain #experience

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution. ↗

— Barbara Deming

#affliction #anger #bring #change #could

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him. ↗

— Max Beerbohm

#defect #either #genius #given #gods