David Roper > Quotes

“The Essenes of Qumran thought Melchizedek was an angel. The philosopher Philo believed he was the divine Logos. The Jewish historian Josephus said he was only a man, but so righteous that he was “by common consent . . . made a priest of God.” David saw Melchizedek as a prototype of the promised Messiah who would establish a new order of king-priests (Psalm 110:1–4).”
― David Roper, Out of the Ordinary: God's Hand at Work in Everyday Lives

“Here’s the thing: What I hold in my mind will, in time, show up in my face, for as George MacDonald once pointed out, the face is “the surface of the mind.” If I cling to bitterness and resentment, if I tenaciously hold a grudge, if I fail to forgive, my countenance will begin to reflect those angry moods. My mother used to tell me that a mad look might someday freeze on my face. She was wiser than she knew.”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days

“as Josephus correctly noted, Melchizedek was also just a man, and as such is an example of the kind of man I want to be. I want to be a friend of souls. I want to stand by the side of the road, as Melchizedek did, waiting for weary travelers, in the places “where the ragged people go.”4 I want to look for those who have been battered and wronged by others, who carry the dreary burden of a wounded and disillusioned heart. I want to nourish and refresh them with bread and wine and send them on their way with a benediction.”
― David Roper, Out of the Ordinary: God's Hand at Work in Everyday Lives

“God is never in a hurry, but He does mean business. He will finish the work as soon as He can. “But” we say, “I have wasted so much of my life. Can I still be of use?” God wastes nothing, not even our sins. When acknowledged, they humble us and make us more merciful to others in their weakness. We can become more approachable, more useful to God and to others. Indeed, each loss has its own compensation.”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days

“There are hermit souls that live withdrawn In the peace of their self-content; There are souls, like stars, that dwell apart In a fellowless firmament; There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths Where highways never ran; But let me live by the side of the road, And be a friend to man. —Samuel Walter Foss”
― David Roper, Out of the Ordinary: God's Hand at Work in Everyday Lives

“When President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was dead wrong. It’s the absence of fear that we should fear.”
― David Roper, A Man to Match the Mountain

“I have a friend, a Catholic priest, who served as Mother Teresa’s translator when she was here in the United States to address the United Nations. I was in his study one day and spied a picture of the two of them standing together on the streets of New York. I marveled again at her ancient, wrinkled, leathered, lined face, utterly unadorned. Wisdom had softened her face; character had drawn its lines. Gazing at those marks of courage and kindness, I thought: Is there anyone more homely—or more beautiful? Hers was the beauty of holiness. May it be ours as well.”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days

“Lord With a crooked stick for a cane I’m limping home. Mocked and maligned Stooped and stupid Soiled and shabby I limp toward You. —Ruth Harms Calkin”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days

“The devil hates our laughter. “Joy,” C. S. Lewis’s demon, Screwtape, writes to his nephew, “is a disgusting and a direct assault to the realism, dignity and austerity of hell.”
― David Roper, Out of the Ordinary: God's Hand at Work in Everyday Lives

“To say we’ll only have complete satisfaction in God strikes us as too simple, but the simplest answers reveal the profoundest truths. Until we find our peace in Him, we’ll continue to feel alone, caught in midlife crisis and forever itching.”
― David Roper, The Strength of a Man

“Fairy tales do not deny the existence of . . . sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence if you will) universal final defeat . . . giving a glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. —J. R. R. Tolkien”
― David Roper, Out of the Ordinary: God's Hand at Work in Everyday Lives

“Once you give up your integrity, everything else is a piece of cake. —J. R. Ewing”
― David Roper, Out of the Ordinary: God's Hand at Work in Everyday Lives

“It is a commonplace of Christian thought that joy is deep tranquility. Yet it seems to me that biblical joy is something more: it is “holy laughter”—the laughter of Sarah, for example: “God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me” (Genesis 21:6).”
― David Roper, Out of the Ordinary: God's Hand at Work in Everyday Lives

“Melchizedek blessed Abram, saying, “Blessed be Abram by God Most High.” As Billy Graham would say, he blessed him real good.”
― David Roper, Out of the Ordinary: God's Hand at Work in Everyday Lives

“Some folks try to romanticize youth, but I don’t remember it that way. “Carefree youth” is an oxymoron to me. My adolescence was a perfectly miserable time—years when I tore down family traditions and my inhibitions and prostituted the strength and vigor of youth on myself. I was an “angel-like spright with black sinne,” John Donne would say, and lived with my fair share of guilt and self-reproach. Thus I pray with David, “Remember not the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways.”33 “If only I could live my life over again,” we say, “I would do better.” Not likely. A fresh start for any of us would amount to almost nothing without the experience necessary to make the right adjustments. “The light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us,” Coleridge said.”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days

“I re-read John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress the other day and came across this passage: “After this, Mr. Ready-to-halt called for his fellow-pilgrims, and told them, saying, I am sent for, and God shall surely visit you also. So he desired Mr. Valiant to make his will. And because he had nothing to bequeath to them that should survive him but his crutches, and his good wishes, therefore thus he said: These crutches I bequeath to my son that shall tread in my steps, with a hundred warm wishes that he may prove better than I have been.”30 My staffs and crutches I bequeath to our three sons. 23”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days

“God made your body, mind, and soul. And He isn't done with you; He is still making you. God is making you braver, stronger, purer, more peaceful, more loving, less selfish - the kind of person you've perhaps always wanted to be.”
― David Roper

“As Lucy says, “Winning isn’t everything; winning big is!” Most of us need to win big. The problem, however, is that there seems to be a law of diminishing returns: the bigger wins give a decreasing measure of satisfaction.”
― David Roper, The Strength of a Man

“G. K. Chesterton claimed that joy, “which is the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian . . . and the dominant theme of Christian faith. By its creed (i.e., what we believe) joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special (occasional) and small.”
― David Roper, Out of the Ordinary: God's Hand at Work in Everyday Lives