Jon

“Until a man learns to deal with the fact that life is hard, he will spend his days chasing the wrong thing, using all his energies trying to make life comfortable, soft, nice, and that is no way for any man to spend his life.”
― John Eldredge, Fathered by God: Learning What Your Dad Could Never Teach You (Embark on the Path to Authentic Manhood and Discover the True Meaning of Masculinity) - The Perfect Gift for Young Men and New Fathers

“If they had been, we would have understood much earlier that our sole purpose at Teplaya-Gora—as indeed in our whole lives—was to do the will of God. Not the will of God as we might wish it, or as we might have envisioned it, or as we thought in our poor human wisdom it ought to be. But rather the will of God as God envisioned it and revealed it to us each day in the created situations with which he presented us. His will for us was the twenty-four hours of each day: the people, the places, the circumstances he set before us in that time. Those were the things God knew were important to him and to us at that moment, and those were the things upon which he wanted us to act, not out of any abstract principle or out of any subjective desire to “do the will of God.” No, these things, the twenty-four hours of this day, were his will; we had to learn to recognize his will in the reality of the situation and to act accordingly. We had to learn to look at our daily lives, at everything that crossed our path each day, with the eyes of God; learn to see his estimate of things, places, and above all people, recognize that he had a goal and a purpose in bringing us into contact with these things and these people, and strive always to do that will—his will—every hour of every day in the situations in which he had placed us. For to what other purpose had we been created? For what other reason had he so arranged it that we should be here, now, this hour, among these people? To what other end had he ordained our being here, if not to see his will in these situations and to strive to do always what he wanted, the way he wanted it, as he would have done it, for his sake, that he might have the fruit and the glory?”
― Walter J. Ciszek, He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith