Quotes on Love amid Sorrow from Shining Gift of God

Image: Ray Brown.

Sarah and I hope you can be blessed by these quotes from our book on Nathanael’s life. Your copy can be ordered from here.

The quotes:

We live to be moved. Harnessing the inspiring emotions, especially those that rock us from the soles of our feet, is the height we love to experience, even though it might involve pain.

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The power of love in community to hold us up in hard times. This is self-evident as I observe a community of nearly two hundred people interacting on social media, notwithstanding my direct experience of the church family for the provision of pastoral care.

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Be open to learning about love’s limitlessness. Nothing teaches us so much as love. We all have exponential potential to learn about love. Where we are focused on learning, love will blossom in our hearts. Where we are purposed positively in love, we cannot help but learn.

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Being vulnerable can make us so much more open to the vulnerable around us. Such vulnerability, when shared openly, forges the seamless flow of relational connectedness, where love surges like a torrent of wellbeing in the lives of those who partake. God is in that.

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The privilege of vulnerability is not to feel unsafe, but to know that others are unsafe and together we may love one another without limits.

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As we look to the Truest Guide we are taught some lessons we hardly expected to learn: the transcendent beauty of truth given in love; that love is known by truth’s courage to step out in faith because it’s right; that what is not easy for some to communicate (but that which is their job) is most willingly received, because we desire to do God’s will every step of the way.

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Dark clouds looming

In the distance booming

Life’s storms in they roll

Our innocence they stole.

But His purpose rose above

In the storm we knew love

Buffeted by the winds, we hope!

The Lord is our strength to cope.

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There is little to say other than to convey love. No ‘advice’ is worthy of God when God is dealing graciously with a soul in grief, intended for resilience, part the way through the journey. And ‘somehow’ is such a powerful word as to be inexplicable.

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It is such an important thing to be not only a giver of love, but also to be a recipient. As a pastor, the default is to give love, but there is also the privilege of modelling how to receive love; to be thankful for the thoughtfulness and compassion of others.

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Prayer transacts as love. It builds. It gives. It builds community. You may never know just how important prayer is until you reach heaven.

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As we journey with a baby who kicks and grows and moves so much, this same baby has no future in this world. Yet, for what we are about to suffer, and for what our family will suffer, and those who love us, and our precious baby him or herself, we are right where God has mandated we be.

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Grief is something I have experienced

It’s something I will experience, again

Whilst there is life and love there will be grief

To live a life devoid of grief is to live life in vain.

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It sounds ridiculous: to enter willingly into the salubrious wonder of sadness. But it is what we must do as we journey with our grief and we make a pleasant requiem out of the love we have lost.

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How will we live this life,

Within grief that unveils strife?

Where God has made love known,

And by love lost He’s principally shown.

Love’s cost is the pit of grief,

For love lost is compromised relief,

Yet through sadness is our only hope,

Being true in our sorrow we cope.

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We are comforted by love. And love is all we need.

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Sadness is not a thing to be feared. It has value, and, from a growth viewpoint, sadness is of far more value that frivolity. Sorrow connects us not only with the intimate heart of God, it connects us with those who love us, because we must simply reach out and take the love we need. Let’s not be afraid of sadness when it arrives. But, also, let it not define us, but refine us. There are many things that sadness can teach us, if we are patient and humble learners.

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God will open up our hearts like a tin can and others’ love will pour into us.

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We all need help in life, and we are benefited by the help of loved ones and from those who care for us, but courage is just as much, if not more, the help we need in our moment of need.

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When a tragedy occurs, like the sudden death of a loved one, we are so shocked as to hardly reckon it possible that we could ever feel this way. We are blindsided by a sense of emotion that is incomprehensible. Where is God in this?

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To give love is a blessing to both the giver and to the receiver.

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We don’t really need people’s ministry to heal us, but we do need your love and encouragement to keep going.

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There is just no easy answer to the question of God’s unconditional love that allows suffering. I say allow because we cannot imagine God bringing suffering into our lives – because we accept that God is a good God. It does us no good to imagine a God who is capable of bringing harm into our lives.

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If we have faith to pray to God and share our innermost feelings, God will be real to us in that moment. And as we look back months and years later, we will see God’s providential hand in our darkest time and most desperate need. That’s unconditional love!

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God loves us all and he hates it whenever we must endure such pain. But God knows, as well, that we can endure anything, through the grace of the Spirit, which is power beyond reason, hope when there isn’t any, and joy when it’s required.

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If we are already deep down low, the deconstruction process is well under way. Let us unlearn all the things that hinder love, joy, and peace. And let us begin embracing those things that build others up, that give to others, and that bless others.

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As we seem to be encouraging others, their love is such an encouragement to us.

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There is no substitute for traversing life than faith outworked in love fuelled by hope.

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God’s love is like that. It is the power to endure much pain in the hope it will mean something one day.

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Pain is best seen also as a gift, because it opens the doorway into neediness; an acknowledged brokenness. When we accept we need people, then, and only then, will God bring into our lives the love we need in order to be healed.

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We need others in our orbit in order for God’s love to be real. The Lord uses people with which to affect his love.

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The living never make too much of life until they are faced with the death of a loved one. Then their mortality comes into view. And can there be any emptier loneliness than the loss of a loved one?

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There’s something about a gathering,

Of those who mourn in grief,

Where love between them enjoins,
That’s how God facilitates relief.

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Grief is a consequence of love lost.

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Our best hope in the case of loved ones lost to death in Jesus is we may follow them into that good place.

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Being carried is managed by the simple fact of knowing we are being carried by others’ love – their prayers manifest in the kindness of affection. We must, however, believe by faith that 1) people are praying, and 2) their prayers are making a significant difference.

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Nothing can defeat us. We are made for this journey and in the sharing of it truthfully. As realities hit us hard we have everything we need to deal with such realities because of courage, humility, and the grace that is ever sufficient, notwithstanding the love of dear family and friends.

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Sadness embraced opens the path to faith, hope, and love. Only as we call our realities for what they truly are – which takes courage and humility birthed out of wisdom – do we stand to be shown the way.

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You were mine,
Yes, you were ours,
Vulnerable and kind,
Like the flowers.
Forgotten not,
Memories are good,
We love you a lot,
As only we could.

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My loneliest times taught me what even God could not teach me otherwise. I learned the value of learning is kindled in the crucible of agony. Learning about God, life, truth, and love occurs most powerfully when we are in our deepest pain.

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We all have to say goodbye to our loved ones, and this world, at some point. It’s not that far away. What sounds depressing is the very impetus we need to make the most of life now. With this outlook we can endure anything in this life.

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The fact that we have experienced something very painful – but that which was made much easier by our faith in God and his abundant grace through the plethora of prayer we received – that others too have faced brings us together in love.

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Grief is the child of love — and, in that way — love bears what grief brings.

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If grief is the child of love, love must be strong to bear it. Love never gives up and never lets up. It continues patiently and faithfully no matter how unfaithful and impatient her children are.

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Love suffers the bruising incredulity of loss meekly by soothing the pain through acceptance. Love wishes to do a work of acceptance in every one of us.

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If life was fair it would not give us over to grief, but, then again, without grief there can be no love! And with no love there is no life.

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How ironic that love is the best of life, loss is the worst of life, yet love causes loss.

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God knows we would not enter into grief without having first committed our hearts and souls to a love we just cannot give up on.