Meassage from "Reaching the Invisible God" by Phillip Yancy

"The Christian has a great advantage over other men, not by being less fallen than they, nor less doomed to live in fallen world, but by knowing that he is a fallen man in a fallen world." -- C.S. Lewis

A pilgrim "who is on the way, though not necessarily very far along it, and who has at least some dim and half-baked idea of who to thank." --- Frederick Buechner

"I die of thirst, here at the fountainside." ---- Richard Wilbur

"This is hard teaching. Who can accept it?" (Disciples)

"You do not want to leave too, do you?" (Jesus)

"Lord, to whom shall we go?" (Simon Peter) John 6:68

"Your faith has healed you"

"Overtime, I have grown more comfortable with mystery rather than certainty. God does not twist arms and never forces us into a corner with faith in himself as the only exit. We can never present the Final proof, to ourselves or to anyone else. We will always, with Pascal, see "too much to deny and too little to be sure..."

Jesus often made it harder, not easier, for people to believe. He never violate an individual's freedom to decide, even to decide against him. ... And Jesus's story of the prodigal son reveals a divine attitude of forgiveness-in-advance that may seem indulgent and risky, but it did restore a dead son to life. "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free," ... I have concluded its converse is also true: "Truth" that does not set free is not truth.

Gradually those doubts settles into a lesser place, or found resolution, and they did so, I think , because fear melted away. I learned that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear. One of John Donne's Holy Sonnets contains the mysterious line, "Churches are best for prayer, that have least light." ... After all, we lean on God out of need, not out of surplus.

As Thomas Graham, dean of a theological school, put it, faith is reason gone courageous - not the opposite of reason, to be sure, but something more than reason and never satisfied by reason alone. A step always remains beyond the range of light.