Debbie Piper

“It’s all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I’d never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn’t what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention

“This job has been given to me to do. Therefore, it is a gift. Therefore, it is a privilege. Therefore, it is an offering I may make to God. Therefore, it is to be done gladly, if it is done for Him. Here, not somewhere else, I may learn God’s way. In this job, not in some other, God looks for faithfulness.”
― Elisabeth Elliot

“Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his “Abba” Father—the only transformation adequate to the human self—remains the necessary goal of human life. But it lies beyond the reach of programs of inner transformation that draw merely on the human spirit—even when the human spirit is itself treated as ultimately divine.”
― Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ

“He saves us by realistic restoration of our heart to God and then by dwelling there with his Father through the distinctively divine Spirit. The heart thus renovated and inhabited is the only real hope of humanity on earth.”
― Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ