Catherine Marshall Quotes & Sayings

Poverty is a scandal of our times because it CAN be changed. — Catherine Marshall

I learned that true forgiveness includes total self-acceptance. And out of acceptance wounds are healed and happiness is possible again. — Catherine Marshall

For years I lived in inner terror that I was, at heart, a weak and indecisive man. I think it was this fear that made me sick. Dean showed me how foolish all this was. 'Face the truth, Ken,' he told me. 'You are weak. All of us are. Come to terms with it.'
But then he pointed out I didn't have to stay this way, that God was certainly not weak. Dean has helped me understand that if I have the Spirit of God within me, then His strength would replace my weakness ... — Catherine Marshall

Truth could never be wholly contained in words. — Catherine Marshall

Acceptance says, True, this is my situation at the moment. I'll look unblinkingly at the reality of it. But I'll also open my hands to accept willingly whatever a loving Father sends me. — Catherine Marshall

When the dream in our heart is one that God has planted there, a strange happiness flowers into us. At that moment all of the spiritual resources of the universe are released to help us. Our praying is then at one with the will of God and becomes a channel for the Creator's always joyous, triumphant purposes for us and our world. — Catherine Marshall

I still don't understand anything- exept that somehow I know that You are love. And that in my heart has been so great a love for Christy as I did not know could exist on this earth. You, God, must be responsible. You must have put it there. So what do I do with it now? — Catherine Marshall

The only time I ever find my dealings with God less than clear-cut is when I'm not being honest with Him. The fuzziness is always on my side, not His. — Catherine Marshall

Lord, what are you trying to teach me? — Catherine Marshall

A Christian has no business being satisfied with mediocrity. He's supposed to reach for the stars. Why not? He's not on his own anymore. He has God's help now. — Catherine Marshall

His theology is mostly focused on helping people with their physical needs. All that's important, of course, but he'll hit a dry spell someday and need something more than social causes to keep him going." ...
"if you're serious about writing on the deeper life, you simply cannot ignore the centrality of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. — Catherine Marshall

The purpose of all prayer is to find God's will and to make that our prayer — Catherine Marshall

What do you do when strength is called for and you have no strength? You evoke a power beyond your own and use stamina you did not know you had. You open your eyes in the morning grateful that you can see the sunlight of yet another day. You draw yourself to the edge of the bed and then put one foot in front of the other and keep going. You weep with those who gently close the eyes of the dead, and somehow, from the salt of your tears, comes endurance for them and for you. You pour out that resurgence to minister to the living. — Catherine Marshall

So once I shut down my privilege of disliking anyone I choose and holding myself aloof if I could manage it, greater understanding, growing compassion came to me. — Catherine Marshall

Of course you'll encounter trouble. But behold a God of power who can take any evil and turn it into a door of hope. — Catherine Marshall

The house, it's already been a-settin' here for a hundred years. It'll be right here tomorrow. It's today I must be livin'. — Catherine Marshall

My father always told us that if we will let God, He can use even our disappointments, even our annoyances to bring us a blessing. There's a practical way to start the process too: by thanking Him for whatever happens, no matter how disagreeable it seems. — Catherine Marshall

I'm all for Spencer. He's sincere, idealistic, and a good preacher. I just don't believe that social action is the main business of the Church."
"Then what is?"
"Salvation. — Catherine Marshall

I experienced the reality of the spiritual body and learned that it has every faculty of the physical body, though with greater sensitivity and some dimensions added ... There will be nothing shocking in the transition, only a continuation of who I am now. — Catherine Marshall

I might never have realized who I really was or have gotten answers to the relentless questions that had driven me to the Cove without those quiet hours spent with Fairlight in the mountains. I do not know why it is that an intimate contact with wildlife and a personal observation of nature helps so much in this self-discovery. But that it is so, I have seen in other people's lives as well as my own ... even a few bricks and macadam are a shield between us and the wisdom that nature has to give. — Catherine Marshall

When you heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people - especially the ripsnorting sinners - so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results. — Catherine Marshall

God is the only one who can make the valley of trouble a door of hope. — Catherine Marshall

Despite disappointments, the Christian is obligated to pray for the sick because we are bidden to do so and because the crumb of our caring is but a morsel broken from the whole loaf of the Father's infinite and tender love. — Catherine Marshall

Like most ministers, Peter was not the best judge of his own sermons. Almost invariably when he thought he had written one of his best, the rest of us did not rate it so highly. And, when on Saturday night he was bemoaning a "terrible sermon," he could be pretty sure his congregation would think it terrific. How other people rated his sermons was a constant source of astonishment to him. "That's what keeps me humble," he often said. — Catherine Marshall

The unfolding of our friendship with the Father will be a never-ending revelation strretching on into eternity — Catherine Marshall

Our prayers must not be efforts to bend God to our will but to yield ourselves to His. — Catherine Marshall

Perceptive people like you wound more easily than others. But if we're going to work on God's side, we have to decide to open our hearts to the griefs and pain all around us. It's not an easy decision. A dangerous one too. And a tiny narrow door to enter into a whole new world.
But in that world a great experience waits for us: meeting the One who's entered there before us. He suffers more than any of us could because His is the deepest emotion and the highest perception ... He doesn't just leave us and Himself in the anguish. At the point where His ultimate in love meets His total capacity to absorb and feel all our agony, there the miracle happens and the exterior situation changes. I've seen that miracle — Catherine Marshall

I'd long since learned that no difference in viewpoint should ever be allowed to cause the least break in love. Indeed, it cannot, if it's real love.
... But relationships can be kept intact without compromising one's own beliefs. And if we do not keep them intact, but give up and allow the chasm, we're breaking the second greatest commandment. — Catherine Marshall

Have you ever watched a baby learning to walk? He totters, arms stretched out to balance himself. He wobbles - and falls, perhaps bumps his nose. Then he puts the palms of his little hands flat on the floor, hikes his rear end up, looks around to see if anybody is watching him. If nobody is, usually he doesn't bother to cry, just precariously balances himself - and tries again. Well, the baby can teach us. What you've undertaken ... isn't a state of perfection to be arrived at all of the sudden. It's a WALK, and a walk isn't static but ever-changing. We Friends say that all discouragement is from an evil source and can only end in more evil. Wallowing in self-condemnation or feeling sorry for yourself is worse than falling on your face in the first place ... So thee is human. — Catherine Marshall

There's always the danger that the extreme feminist will end up quite unfulfilled as a girl. — Catherine Marshall

I was too old for my father to (be protective), too young to be flattered. — Catherine Marshall

The search for God begins at the point of need. — Catherine Marshall

In rejecting secrecy I had also rejected the road to cynicism. — Catherine Marshall

If your every human plan and calculation has miscarried, if, one by one, human props have been knocked out, and doors have shut in your face, take heart. God is trying to get a message through to you, and the message is: "Stop depending on inadequate human resources. Let me handle the matter." ... — Catherine Marshall

Those who never rebelled against God or at some point in their lives shaken their fists in the face of heaven, have never encountered God at all. — Catherine Marshall

Still, he never felt that the sermons he wrote at the cottage were good. By the time he got back to Washington to preach them, they no longer excited him. They seemed cold, lifeless. This was probably because Peter's best sermons rose out of the soil of emotion in his own heart. That emotion had to be a present, valid reality. He could not conjure it up. — Catherine Marshall

One can believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ and feel no personal loyalty to Him at all - indeed, pay no attention whatever to His commandments and His will for one's life. — Catherine Marshall

One can believe intellectually in the efficacy of prayer and never do any praying. — Catherine Marshall

Where there was hunger there would also be bread. — Catherine Marshall

Whence comes this idea that if what we are doing is fun, it can't be God's will? The God who made giraffes, a baby's fingernails, a puppy's tail, a crooknecked squash, the bobwhite's call, and a young girl's giggle, has a sense of humor. Make no mistake about that. — Catherine Marshall

I might have felt unimportant pitted against the awesome might of the mountains. I did not. Rather, on that mountain top I found something important that I had never known before: an awareness of a vital connection between me and the Authority behind all this beauty. — Catherine Marshall

Satan cannot create anything new, cannot create anything at all. He must steal what God has created. Thus he twists love and God's wonderful gift of sex into lust and sadism and myriad perversions. He disfigures the heart's deep desire to worship God and persuades us to bow before lesser gods of lust or money or power. — Catherine Marshall

Often God has to shut a door in our face, so that He can subsequently open the door through which He wants us to go. — Catherine Marshall

Why should a child's future be shaped by where they are born? — Catherine Marshall

Clean up a pigsty," she commented one evening, "and if the creatures in it still have pig-minds and pig-desires, soon it will be the same old pigsty again. — Catherine Marshall

dont wish upon a star reach for one — Catherine Marshall

Evil is real - and powerful. It has to be fought, not explained away, not fled. And God is against evil all the way. So each of us has to decide where WE stand, how we're going to live OUR lives. We can try to persuade ourselves that evil doesn't exist; live for ourselves and wink at evil. We can say that it isn't so bad after all, maybe even try to call it fun by clothing it in silks and velvets. We can compromise with it, keep quiet about it and say it's none of our business. Or we can work on God's side, listen for His orders on strategy against the evil, no matter how horrible it is, and know that He can transform it. — Catherine Marshall

I often marveled that the interior peace of the woman was reflected so faithfully in her surroundings. Even the selection and arrangements of her possessions gave an aura of uncluttered calm. In addition, there was a directness in her approach to all of life
including housekeeping
that never failed to fascinate me.
Miss Alice was a person to whom color, symmetry of line and contrast of texture were important. — Catherine Marshall

The cross stands as the final symbol that no evil exists that God cannot turn into a blessing. He is the living Alchemist who can take the dregs from the slag-heaps of life - disappointment, frustration, sorrow, disease, death, economic loss, heartache - and transform the dregs into gold. — Catherine Marshall

So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It's quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you've come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about. — Catherine Marshall

Living in the middle of beauty like this, we've no call to have puny ideas about God. Why do you suppose His world is so fancy-fine, so full of wonderment if He doesn't want everything to be good and perfect and right and healthy? But we can spoil His good work. When we mess things up, then we shouldn't blame Him and try to make ourselves feel better by contending that it's what He wanted. — Catherine Marshall

It's today I must be living. — Catherine Marshall

No matter how little you have, you can always give some of it away. — Catherine Marshall

I understood that the reason we have to accept other people is simply because God receives us just the way we are. Yes, all of us to the last person ...
I had never thought it should be that way. Had I been doing it, I would have arranged gradations of acceptability according to how bad or how good we were
or how hard we have tried. But ... the Power who broods over our aching world has quite a different idea: He persists in receiving us and loving us all even when we reject Him and refuse to have anything to do with Him, even when we strut our little intellects and insist that He does not exist. — Catherine Marshall

Once we recognize our need for Jesus, then the building of our faith begins. It is a daily, moment-by-moment life of absolute dependence upon Him for everything — Catherine Marshall

Have you ever thought that the only ugly things in this Cove are man's fault, while the beautiful things are God's work? Look at those mountains. — Catherine Marshall

God insists that we ask, not because He needs to know our situation, but because we need the spiritual discipline of asking. — Catherine Marshall

Some of what I wrote bordered on blasphemy ... If there was a God, He would have to be truth. And in that case, candor
however impertinent
would be more pleasing to Him than posturing. — Catherine Marshall

When we hold a photo negative up to the light all objects are reversed. Black is white, white is black. Moreover, the character lines of any face in the picture are not clear. Once placed into the developing solution, what photographers call "the latent image" is revealed in the print-darkness is turned to light; and, lo, we have a beautiful picture. — Catherine Marshall

God's way of dealing with us is to throw us into situations over our depth, then supply us with the necessary ability to swim. — Catherine Marshall