Pondering Tidbits of Truth - April 13, 2023

Pondering Tidbits of Truth is my simple and inadequate way of providing nuggets of spiritual wisdom for you to chew on from time to time.

Catherine Doherty, Servant of God

"God invites us to accept the loneliness of walking alone with Him. He says: ‘Yes, you need help from other people, but first get it from Me. Attach yourself to Me. I will give you everything you need, for I am the Lord of everything. I will renew and restore you and you will have new eyes and new ears."

(From Are You Ever Lonely? March 2023 issue of Restoration)

 

St. John Marie Vianney

"What a sad life does he lead who wants both to please the world and to serve God! It is a great mistake to make, my friends.

Apart from the fact that you are going to be unhappy all the time, you can never attain the stage at which you will be able to please the world and please God. It is as impossible a feat as trying to put an end to eternity.

Take the advice that I am going to give you now and you will be less unhappy: give yourselves wholly to God or else wholly to the world.

Do not look for and do not serve more than one master, and once you have chosen the one you are going to follow, do not leave him.

You surely remember what Jesus Christ said to you in the Gospel: you cannot serve God and Mammon; that is to say, you cannot follow the world and the pleasures of the world and Jesus Christ with His Cross. Of course you would be quite willing to follow God just so far and the world just so far!

Let me put it even more clearly: you would like it if your conscience, if your heart, would allow you to go to the altar in the morning and the dance in the evening; to spend part of the day in church and the remainder in the cabarets or other places of amusement; to talk of God at one moment and the next to tell obscene stories or utter calumnies about your neighbor; to do a good turn for your next-door neighbor on one occasion and on some other to do him harm; in other words, to do good and speak well when you are with good people and to do wrong when you are in bad company."

(From The Sermons of the Cure d'Ars 1960)

Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

"Every moment comes to you pregnant with a Divine purpose; time being so precious that God deals it out only second by second. Once it leaves your hands and your power to do with it as you please, it plunges into eternity - to remain forever whatever you made of it."

(From March 23, 2023 Reflection from The Sheen Institute)