Quotes about Challenges

G. K. Chesterton (1874—1936) has been widely credited with saying, "Jesus promised His disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

Our society is walking through a maze of cultural land mines and the heaviest price is exacted as we send our children on ahead.

When we have overcome absence with phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer heat with air-conditioning—when we have overcome all these and much more besides, then there will abide two things with which we must cope: the evil in our hearts and death.

We miss the roses and see only the thorns. We take for granted the warmth of the sun and get depressed by the frequency of the rain or the snow. We ignore the sounds of life in a nursery because we are preoccupied with the sounds of sirens responding to an emergency.

All walls are not barriers. They may be there for a purpose.

One can go down the line and see that every claim that Jesus made of Himself challenged my culture's most basic assumptions about life and meaning. (It is important to remember, of course, that these basic religions within the Indian framework are also not in concert with each other. Buddha was a Hindu before he rejected some of Hinduism's fundamental doctrines and conceived in their place the Buddhist way. Islam radically differs from Hinduism.) Ironically

He could not make them shut-up; they were worse than women. They had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed.

Being negative only makes a difficult journey more difficult. You may be given a cactus, but you don't have to sit on it.

Maybe you don't just have one Goliath. Maybe you have his whole family!

Sometimes new opportunity means new opposition. Not everything God asks us to do will be comfortable.

God does not always call us to go back physically to a place we have been. But if for example we have a difficult time submitting to a boss with a certain personality God may call us to continue working with someone who has the same personality until we master the situation in a godly way. God does not want us to be on the run He wants us to confront our fears and frustrations in order to find peace in Him.

Habakkuk 3:19 says that the way we develop hind's feet (a hind is an animal that can climb mountains swiftly) is "to walk [not to stand still in terror, but to walk] and make [spiritual] progress upon" the "high places [of trouble, suffering or responsibility]!" The way God helps us make spiritual progress is by being with us to strengthen and encourage us to "keep on keeping on" in rough times. It's easy to quit; it takes faith to go through.