Linear Trail, Erwin
“There is a vast, rich reality of obedience beneath the feet of disciples…
For obedience is not a stodgy plodding in the ruts of religion,
it is a hopeful race toward God’s promises.”
Eugene Peterson, 1932-
“A Long Obedience in the Same Direction:
Discipleship in an Instant Society”
”I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere
and don’t notice it….People think pleasing God is all God care about.
But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
author Alice Walker, 1944-, The Color Purple
winner of 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award
“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about?
It just makes me feel glad to be alive—it’s such an interesting world.
It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it?
There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?”
Anne Shirley
Anne of Green Gables, 1908
written by Lucy Maud Montgomery
“Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk
step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower
and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.”
Beatrix Potter, 1866-1943
English author of children’s books, conservationist
“There is nothing that makes us love someone so much as praying for them.”
William Law, 1686-1761
English theologian and author
Blue Ridge Parkway, NC
“The prayer that never fails: ‘Thy will be done.’”
Father Tim, Mitford Series
by Jan Karon
“How can I find you, God? How can I claim your strength?
I am tired, so tired…tense, so tense. And my nerves are screaming.
Now, if ever, I need you. I need your reassurance and your peace.
Yet there is only this raw trembling vacancy inside me.
This sense of emptiness and futility. Come back to me, Lord.
Calm me, quiet me, for I am indeed weary
and heavy-laden and I need your promised rest.”
Marjorie Holmes, 1910-2002
Inspirational writer
Amish country, Holmes County, Ohio
“You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.”
Robert Frost, 1874-1963
Pulitzer Prize winning American poet
Aunt Willie’s Wildflowers, Blountville, TN
“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and
refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich;
to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard;
to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never;
in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common — this is my symphony.”
William Henry Channing, 1810-1884
clergyman, reformer
River Otter, Grandfather Mountain, NC
“Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike,
they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them,
their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies,
their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.”
Voltaire, 1694-1778
French Enlightenment writer and philosopher
letter to Count Schomberg, 31 August 1769
Rocky Fork, Unicoi County, TN
“The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says, ‘Give me All.
I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money
and so much of your work: I want You…No half-measures are any good.
I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there,
I want to have the whole tree down…Hand over the whole natural self,
all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you
think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead.
I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.’”
C. S. Lewis, 1898-1963
“The Joyful Christian”
Irish author and scholar
“Solviture ambulando”
(It is solved by walking)
St. Augustine, 354-430
Theologian and important figure in the development of Western Christianity
View of Limestone Cove and Stone Mountain from Horseback Ridge
“We do need reminding, not of what God can do, but of what he cannot do, or will not, which is to catch time in its free fall and stick a nickel’s worth of sense into our days. And we need reminding of what time can do, must do; churn out enormity at random and beat it, with God’s blessing, into our heads: that we are created, created sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone.”
Annie Dillard, 1945-
Pulitzer Prize-winning American author
“We trust, not because a god exists,
but because this God exists.”
C. S. Lewis, 1898-1963
“Lay hold of something that will help you,
and then use it to help somebody else.”
Booker T. Washington, 1856-1915
American educator, author, and leader
of the African American community
Sunflower at Aunt Willie’s Wildflowers
“Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.”
Michelangelo, 1475-1564
Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer
Sunset at Horseback Ridge, Unicoi County, TN
“What you do when you don’t have to,
determines what you will be when you can no longer help it.”
Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936
English author and poet born in India
Millstone Creek Falls, Washington Co., TN
“Love is an act of endless forgiveness.”
Peter Ustinov, 1921-2004
Academy Award-winning British actor
“If the trials of many years were gathered into one, they would overwhelm us;
therefore, in pity to our little strength, He sends first one, and then another,
then removes both, and lays on a third, heavier, perhaps, than either;
but all is so wisely measured to our strength that the bruised reed
is never broken. We do not enough look at our trials is this continuous
and successive view. Each one is sent to teach us something, and
altogether they have a lesson which is beyond the power
of any to teach alone.”
H. E. Manning, 1808-1892
English Roman Catholic Archbishop and Cardinal
Ichneumon Wasp, Bass Lake, Blowing Rock, NC
“Two-legged creatures we are supposed to love as we love ourselves.
The four-legged, also, can come to seem pretty important.
But six legs are too many from the human standpoint.”
Joseph W. Krutch, 1893-1970
American ecology writer and naturalist
from Knoxville, Tennessee
Daybreak on the French Broad River, Johnson Bible College, Knoxville, TN
“In the spiritual life, the word ‘discipline’ means ‘the effort to create some space
in which God can act.’ Discipline means to prevent everything in your life
from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you’re not occupied,
and certainly not preoccupied in the spiritual life. In the spiritual life,
discipline means to create that space in which something
can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.”
Henri Nouwen, 1932-1996
Dutch Catholic priest and writer
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying.”
Robert Herrick, 1591-1674
Church of England clergyman, poet
Rocky Fork, Unicoi County, TN
“We — or at least I — shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions
if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best, our faith and reason
will tell us that He is adorable, but we shall not have found Him so,
not have ‘tasted and seen.’ Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you
something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy.
These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of godlight’ in the woods of experience.”
C. S. Lewis, 1898-1963, Irish author and scholar
“Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer”
“Patches of Godlight: Father Tim’s Favorite Quotes”
by Jan Karon, author of the bestselling Mitford Years Series
Tulip in Walled Garden, Biltmore Estate, NC
“Lord, help me find the next word,
And the next. And the next…”
Father Tim, Mitford series
by Jan Karon
