Deborah > Deborah's Quotes

“Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.”
― Corrie ten Boom

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

“Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.”
― Corrie Ten Boom

“If you look at the world, you'll be distressed. If you look within, you'll be depressed. If you look at God you'll be at rest.”
― Corrie Ten Boom

“This is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place

“Worrying is carrying tomorrow's load with today's strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn't empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”
― Corrie Ten Boom

“Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.”
― Corrie Ten Boom

“Trying to do the Lord's work in your own strength is the most confusing, exhausting, and tedious of all work. But when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, then the ministry of Jesus just flows out of you.”
― Corrie Ten Boom

“Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him....Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness....And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place

“Don't bother to give God instructions; just report for duty.”
― Corrie Ten Boom

“Dear Jesus...how foolish of me to have called for human help when You are here.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place

“Do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill that love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“You can never learn that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have.”
― Corrie Ten Boom

“And so seated next to my father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, "Father, what is sexsin?"
He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case off the floor and set it on the floor.
Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?" he said.
I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.
It's too heavy," I said.
Yes," he said, "and it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It's the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger, you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“Worry is a cycle of inefficient thoughts whirling around a center of fear.”
― Corrie Ten Boom

“If God has shown us bad times ahead, it's enough for me that He knows about them. That's why He sometimes shows us things, you know - to tell us that this too is in His hands.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place

“God's viewpoint is sometimes different from ours - so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things....In the Bible I learn that God values us not for our strenght or our brains but simply because He has made us.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place

“Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do. ”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place

“Perhaps only when human effort had done it's best and failed, would God's power alone be free to work.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place

“All through the short afternoon they kept coming, the people who counted themselves Father's friends. Young and old, poor and rich, scholarly gentlemen and illiterate servant girls—only to Father did it seem that they were all alike. That was Father's secret: not that he overlooked the differences in people; that he didn't know they were there.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“...suddenly I was afraid of what Father would say. Afraid he would say, "There'll be someone else soon," and that forever afterward this untruth would lie between us. For in some deep part of me I knew already that there would not--soon or ever--be anyone else.

The sweet cigar-smell came into the room with Father. And of course he did not say the false, idle words.

"Corrie," he began instead, "do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain.

"There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.

"God loves Karel--even more than you do--and if you ask Him, He will give you His love for this man, a love nothing can prevent, nothing destroy. Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way, Corrie, God can give us his perfect way."

I did not know, as I listened to Father's footsteps winding back down the stairs, that he had given me more than the key to this hard moment. I did not know that he had put into my hands the secret that would open far darker rooms than this--places where there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all.”
― Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“When you are covered by His wings, it can get pretty dark.”
― Corrie ten Boom

“Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuffs of hatred. It is a power that breaks the chains of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook

“Oh, this was the great ploy of Satan in that kingdom of his: to display such blatant evil one could almost believe one's own secret sin didn't matter.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“If the Gospels were truly the pattern of God’s activity, then defeat was only the beginning.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there”
― George Harrison