Dakota Strasinger

“When you’re a Christian,” she told me, “you obey God because you want to, because He’s changing you, because He’s made you a new person on the inside. It’s not like you just go out and sin as much as you like and don’t worry about it. But at the same time, you don’t need to do anything to make God love you.”
― Rifqa Bary, Hiding in the Light: Why I Risked Everything to Leave Islam and Follow Jesus

“For the first time in my life, I felt I could truly see through God’s eyes and feel what He felt. I could see the homeless and feel the sting of reproach in which they lived their lives. I could see my brother striving for acceptance and love from my father and feeling the pain of his constant rejection. I could see the popular girls at school and feel their emptiness and desire to have more than outward beauty. I could see creation—the flowers, the birds in the air, the smell of the morning dew—and feel the joy of my Father in heaven delighting in His creation. This compassion was definitely something I had never experienced before until my commitment to follow Christ.”
― Rifqa Bary, Hiding in the Light: Why I Risked Everything to Leave Islam and Follow Jesus

“If you choose to say ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it’, you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can’. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“We come now to the unbelief of the Gentiles; and this is indeed a matter for complete astonishment, for they laugh at that which is no fit subject for mockery, yet fail to see the shame and ridiculousness of their own idols.”
― Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation