Mike Mason > Quotes

“And as Dad said to me, 'You can't always stop people from being mean. But you can stop them from making you mean.”
― Mike Mason, The Blue Umbrella

“And so must learn to love with our mouths and voices, as well as with our eyes, flesh, heart, brains, and with everything we have, right down to our toenails. There is not anything about us that cannot love, and that is not called to love, and that is not destined to be turned, conformed, and reduced to pure love. It ...is the priceless deposit left by the burning away of selfishness.”
― Mike Mason

“If man really is fashioned, more than anything else, in the image of God, then clearly it follows that there is nothing on earth so near to God as a human being. The conclusion is inescapable, that to be in the presence of even the meanest, lowest, most repulsive specimen of humanity of the world is still to be closer to God than when looking up into a starry sky or at a beautiful sunset. Certainly that is why there is nothing in the new testament about beautiful sunsets.- Mike Mason -Author of "The Mystery of Marriage”
― Mike Mason

“Theology, it turns out, is Satan's favorite game.”
― Mike Mason, The Gospel According to Job

“so the best marriages and the deepest relationships with God grow out of the startling discovery that there is nothing one can do to earn love, and even more startling, that there is also nothing one can do to unlearn it, or to keep oneself from being loved. This is a religious awakening that is utterly different from any other religious experience, no matter how profoundly spiritual it may seem.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“Real love is always fated. It has been arranged before time. It is the most meticulously prepared of coincidences. And fate, of course, is simply a secular term for the will of God, and coincidence for His grace.”
― Mike Mason

“What is such a believer, whose very life depends upon the daily bread of the living Word of God, supposed to do when God is silent?”
― Mike Mason, The Gospel According to Job

“Happy people have just as much pain as anyone else, in some cases more. It could even be argued that the happy feel pain more acutely than the unhappy, whose feelings are relatively numb. The real difference in happy people is that they’re not trapped by their pain. Rather than settling inside a happy soul, pain moves through it as through a channel, and that channel is joy. Joy keeps pain moving.”
― Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul: Celebrating God's Gift of Joy

“There is no trick of a magician or spell of a witch doctor, no drug or mesmerism or bribery or torture or coercion that can compare in power with the force for change unleashed in the human breast through the touch of love.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“Love coaxes and even hood-winks us into the making of a decision so radical that if left to our own devices we would never have entertained it for a moment.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“As long as the self is consumed in the struggle to make itself lovely, it cannot love. First it must come to the end of its own resources, for the power to love derives purely and solely from the knowledge that one is already loved in return.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“If God accepts us at all, He accepts us wholeheartedly, and He covers us completely with the spotless robe of righteousness. This robe of divine acceptance does not come in gray, but only in dazzling white, and one either has the robe or not. One is either righteous or wicked. And anyone who is wicked can have that status quickly amended by a trip to the cross.”
― Mike Mason, The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything

“A marriage, or a marriage partner, may be compared to a great tree growing right up through the center of one’s living room. It is something that is just there, and it is huge, and everything has been built around it, and wherever one happens to be going––to the fridge, to bed, to the bathroom, or out the front door––the tree has to be taken into account. It cannot be gone through; it must respectfully be gone around. It is somehow bigger and stronger than oneself. True, it could be chopped down, but not without tearing the house apart. And certainly it is beautiful, unique, exotic; but also, let’s face it, it is at times an enormous inconvenience.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“How I thank God, then, that from the start He has given me a loving wife to be my best friend of all. She is (as the poem at the end of the book suggests) my monastery. For having set out in the Christian life to become a monk, I found myself instead falling in love with a woman. At first I worried intensely that I’d made a huge mistake, fallen prey to a terrible temptation. But what a surprise it was to discover, over the years, that as a married man (and a father too) I have become more and more a true monk than I ever could have been within the walls of a monastery. How is this? It’s because love, true love, sets people free to be whoever they are.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“The direction of joy isn't always up. Often to be joyful we must go down - down through the noise of racing thoughts, down through swirling chaos of circumstances, down through the deceptive appearances of life, down into the still waters and green pastures of the heart's core.”
― Mike Mason

“hate makes you a prisoner, not just of them but of yourself.”
― Mike Mason, The Blue Umbrella

“With trust, everything is possible.”
― Mike Mason, The Blue Umbrella

“The taking of vows is an act of faith. If people were faithful by nature, vows would not be necessary; their yes would be yes and their no would be no. But it is because people are not inherently faithful nor honest nor loving that they must stand up and declare they will be.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“Of course, it is almost always the case that the couple has much more in common than they may suppose. But marriage seems to specialize, at times, in radically de-emphasizing the similarities between the partners and wildly exaggerating the points of difference.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle

“But since nobody pays us to be happy, regularly we call in sick.”
― Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul: Celebrating God's Gift of Joy

“The Email Phishing Hack:  Phishing refers to a social engineering method used by hackers to gain what should be confidential information from unwitting victims. Phishing works in this way: the hacker sends an official-looking email to the target, purporting to be from the a legitimate institution that”
― Mike Mason, The Dark Side of the Hacking World: What You Need to Know to Guard Your Precious Assets and Remain Safe

“El verdadero amor siempre es predestinado. El mismo fue ordenado desde antes de la creación del tiempo. Entre las coincidencias, es la que más preparación ha tenido. Y el destino, por supuesto, no es otra cosa que un término secular para la voluntad de Dios, y coincidencia de su gracia.”
― Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage