Karla Kauffman > Recent Status Updates

The words wouldn't lead to our independence - words themselves, their very existence, WERE
our independence. If we surrendered our books to them, we'd surrender our minds, leaving us hollowed- out puppets, ready to be controlled.

" 'If I dismiss the ordinary - waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life.' Sometimes we just need to look more closely to realize that, amongst life's minutiae, magic hides."

In the right hands, a cookie or pie or biscuit can be a powerful tool. It's not about the baked goods. It's about your heart. Almost anything can change the world if it's done with love, if you use it to comfort, encourage, or strengthen someone.

If we want to help people, we must enter into their lives, be a part of their community. That is where real change happens, person to person, day by day, when we live life together.

For us to ask God to leave us alone or stop refining us, is to ask him to love us less, not more. Many of us think God unloving when he puts us through the test, pulling and pushing us, changing us into that complete idea of who he wants us to be. We're the objects of God's profound love and attention. Don't ask him to stop perfecting and improving you. God has a final idea in mind and he's bringing you to completion

Perseverance... The path of virtue is not an easy one, and we shouldn't expect our own path to be free of difficulties. Adversity can wear us down and make us want to give up, but if we persist in our goals, we usually find that we become better people for it. When we push against an obstacle, we may not move it at first-we may not move it at all-but in the process we become morally stronger.

The touch of God can transform anything. How God's love can make even the most reprehensible things into beings that are pure and useful and utterly beautiful. God can change a vile plant and he can change a wicked man.

Felt weakness should deepen our dependence upon Christ for strength. Remember, the weaker you feel, the harder you must lean. Lean on Jesus. And leaning means trusting, obeying, spending concentrated time talking to Him, and sharing your deepest needs.

God was with me, and always had been. He was in the earth and the wind, in the ringing and in the silence, in the pain and in the glory of my life.

The war would not best them. And the Nazis would never win. No matter what was to come, the dress would survive. Sandrine would survive and defy them to her core.
"But you will see. When this is all over, everything that has been stolen will be restored. I will hold this down as part of that vow. One day, I will find its owner and we will give it back."

The Lord does not come to put His stamp of approval upon our views and conclusions about life and about Him and His mission. Rather, He comes and gently, but ever so firmly, intrudes with His Word, and He says, "Listen, it is not as you had thought."