Geoffrey Wood > Quotes

“Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it’s just better form.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“They all want to be happy. They all think they should be happy. And they’re quick to trot out their most cherished document and point to where they were promised “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But you’ll find that though they all parrot that little phrase, they think none too hard about that word “pursuit”. To follow, to chase, to inquire, to hunt, to seek. To track in order to overtake and capture. This they don’t do. Instead, having been offered a promise of happiness, they progress to a feeling of entitlement for happiness, then make the leap that happiness should, therefore, be easily won, automatic. There’s too much wrong in there to even scratch at that!”
― Geoffrey Wood

“That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary’s greatest curatives —gratitude.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“Without God, reality is madness. Reason will tell you so. You either madly trust in God, or you trust in a world gone mad without him.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“Gratitude, not guilt, as motivation is always His starting point, thus guilt as a motivation leads nowhere.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“The Americans’ great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“With addiction, a client’s fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana —the fear of Fear itself.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“But here I’d like to add to what the Tempter’s Manual suggests. Depression, at its finest, is not a Future that they cannot hopefully construct, nor a shamed Past that hounds them, but an agonizing Present that they cannot escape. We want to disable their Present so that they cannot use it to look Heavenward.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“Properly understood, Imagination and Prayer are directly proportional —the more they pray beyond their bounds, they expand their vision beyond their resources, their experiences, their expectations.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“When some one mortal yet eternal human merely being relying on precisely nothing but the audacious love of his Maker, calls on Him to part the Heavens, well, we are undone.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“A man walks into a coffee shop. As the man talks across the counter, the coffee guy makes his coffee and sets the cup and saucer between them. But the man doesn’t drink it; he keeps talking, so the coffee gets cold, useless. The coffee guy pours it out and pulls another, sets it up. The man still can’t stop talking and the next one goes bad too. So the coffee guy throws that one out, makes another. And this goes on, see? You may think you’re the coffee guy in the parable, but you’re not —you’re the espresso. (It’s like that in parables.) You’re not for you. You’re someone else’s beverage. And God, the coffee guy, he’s going to keep remaking you again and again, as many times as it takes until you’re drinkable. God’s pulling the shots and he’s got standards.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“At the same time, they find their mind-god has played a trick on them. For mind is a part of the very system it has closed around it, and being inside, there is no reason to think any statement made by some part concerning the whole has any validity. Mind was caused by the material universe, if mind is right. But only the greater can accurately define the lesser, never the other way round, so if mind is right, mind would never know.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“And once their imaginations are liberated, they begin glimpse the grand interconnectedness of all things. Eternity begins to peek out from behind the everyday things and they see the trappings of any earthly moment as the stage and props for Heaven to reveal itself. There is now nothing ordinary. Everything is being used and spun out for His vast scheme and in His eternal economy, nothing is wasted. Suddenly, all the myriad moments and minutiae of a lifetime show their orchestration —there was nothing that did not lead to this! They look over all their time to find that His redemption has always been rushing, swooping, swerving through their experience, racing to and fro to intervene and infuse Grace.”
― Geoffrey Wood

“If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He’s going to ask you what you bought.”
― Geoffrey Wood