psalms on Endurance

In Circle of Quiet , Madeleine L’Engle describes how her young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time was dismissed by eight publishers before it eventually landed with the publishing house of Farrar, Str...

God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.

James Stockdale and what is now known as the Stockdale Paradox comes from his experience as a prisoner of war for seven years during the Vietnam War. The Stockdale Paradox, made famous in Jim Collins’...

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Almost as important as oxygen for human survival is hope. According to Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, “Since my early years as a physician, I learned that taking away hope is, to most people, like pronounci...

Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air, but only for one second without hope.

It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Survival requires more than the basic biological necessities we readily acknowledge—oxygen, food, and water. It also demands something less tangible but equally vital: hope. When hope vanishes, the hu...

Adversity is not simply a tool. It is God's most effective tool for the advancement of our spiritual lives. The circumstances and events that we see as setbacks are oftentimes the very things that...

Our gracious God, you repeatedly move towards us, even when we pull away. You are not deterred by our rejection of you nor our running away from you. Your love is persistent. We confess our distrust o...

The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting. May the God of mercy, who forgives us all our sins, strengthen us in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep us in eternal life...

A common trait of human beings is a fear of failure. Most of us find ways of coping with it, but whenever failure rears its ugly head, it’s difficult not to experience the sting of feeling like we are...

Only faith survives; faith which is not a work, not even a negative work; not an achievement, not even the achievement of humility. . . . Faith is the ground, the new order, the light. . . . Faith is ...

Someone once said that faith is not a personal possession until you have suffered. That person understood that the very nature of faith requires the grit and courage to be in the dark so you can event...

For a long time it seemed to me that real life was about to begin, but there was always some obstacle in the way. Something had to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be serv...

Waiting is a period of learning. The longer we wait, the more we hear about him for whom we are waiting.

Hope is passion for what is possible.

While we are now surrounded by a never-ending number of pixels with our smartphones, there once was a time where the process of developing photographs took something much more significant than pointin...

In his book The Grand Essentials , Ben Patterson recounts the story of an S-4 submarine that sank off the coast of Massachusetts, leaving its entire crew trapped inside. Despite numerous rescue a...

During the time of Oliver Cromwel ascendancy in England, a young soldier faced execution as the curfew bell was set to toll. Desperate to save him, the soldier's beloved approached Cromwell, plead...

The inordinate desire in the west to increase productivity, to go faster and faster, especially in business, can actually become counterproductive. In this short story from the Chinese philosopher Men...

The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any pre...

God's mercy is so great that you may sooner drain the sea of its water, or deprive the sun of its light, or make space too narrow, than diminish the great mercy of God.

We all know people who have been made much meaner and more irritable and more intolerable to live with by suffering: it is not right to say that all suffering perfects. It only perfects one type of pe...

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for pe...

Hope is the physician of each misery.

Gracious God, your love is greater than anything we can imagine. Yet, we are quick to run to other loves and forget about you. Forgive us for turning away from you. Help us to remember your relentless...

I love golf. If only it loved me in return. Alas, it is a one-sided romance. My golf swing is the stuff that keeps an instructor awake at night. One kindly compared it to an octopus falling from a tre...

Because of this we have hope: Two men look out through the same bars One sees mud, one sees stars.