Lynn Austin

“No, Hezekiah...no.. I don't deserve forgiveness. He lifted his head to look at her. None of us do. But God doesn't treat us as our sins deserve. He took her hands in his. I should have shown you that. I should have shown you my God instead of making you serve a God you didn't know. I only showed you his rules and laws. But God doesn't want us to worship Him out of fear. He is our Father, and He wants us to learn to love Him with all our heart and all our soul and all our strength. I should have helped you know Him.”

“If you truly understood the holiness of God, you would have a proper attitude about yourself.”

“Librarians are serious people, seldomgiven to idle jocularity. The reason for this, I believe, is because we are overwhelmed by the enormous number of good books waiting to be read, leaving little time for frivolity. My personal list of must-read books presents a daunting challenge; I can't even imagine the pressure our head librarian must be under.”

“What's it like to fall in love, Tessie?" I asked.She gazed into the darkness for a long moment, then her smile widened. "Well, when you see that certain man you heart flies like paper on the wind--don't matter if you just see him one minute ago or one year ago. When you with him, ain't nothing or nobody else in the whole world but him. You might be walking down the same old street you walk on every day, but if you with him, your feet don't hardly touch the ground anymore, like you just floating on a little cloud. And, honey, you want his arms to be around you more than you want air to breathe.”

“Until Gettysburg," she continued, "I was working for the wrong reasons. At first it was to prove myself worthy in someone's eyes. Later it was out of guilt, trying to find atonement in God's eyes. But atonement is free, never earned. And I've learned that the only person I need to please with my life is God.”

“In the past I had often tried to escape the grown-up world of sorrow through my imagination- dreaming that a handsome young lieutenant would ride to my rescue or that a great empresario would discover my musical talents and whisk me away. I had envisioned knights in shining armor and happily ever after scenes to escape from rules or boredom or pain; including a vision of my mother walking through our front door whole and well again. Now I knew that a lifetime of escape led to a life like Aunt Bertie's. My imagination was a gift, but I had to live in the real world. My eyes had been opened this summer to poverty and crime and abuse and I needed to use my imagination not to escape, but to help people like Irina and Katya, to make my own contribution as the women in the women's pavilion had done. I couldn't do it in the same way Jane Adams and my grandmother and Aunt Mat were, but I would find my own way and my own time.”

“You pray. And you allow the Lord to be your strength. Remember the Lord doesn't give you strength. He is your strength.”

“[God] wants us to work with Him, honey. Not for Him.”

“...Sometimes when people work for God, they get the idea that He should make their life all smooth and easy because they're doing His work...It ain't so. Jesus said life is gonna be hard. Period. He said if you're gonna follow Him, then you're gonna carry a cross, just like He did. this world of ours is under a curse, honey. We need to expect things to be bad. But even if we lose everything, we still have Jesus.”

“Our trials are supposed to turn us toward God, but we whine and complain and wish someone would turn down the fire so we could have our old life back the way it was.”

“Ain't I been trying to tell you that you can't be holding grudges against people? Didn't you hear me say that? What do you think Jesus is gonna say if we come walking up to those pearly gates carrying a whole sackful of grievances and grudges on our backs? Jesus is gonna ask, What's that you toting on your back? Do you want to be opening that sack and showing Him all those ugly thing? He's dressed all in white and shining like the sun, and you're coming in with a load a hate in your your arms? Umm hmm. I can't imagine doing that.”

“She loved him, and her heart was breaking. If she had known how much it hurt to love someone, she never would have given away her heart. But it wasn't a question of giving as much as falling.”

“Bitterness is one of the deadliest emotions we ever feel. You can't look forward when you're bitter, only backward - thinking about what you've lost, stuck in the past, despairing because it's gone. In the end, it devours all hope.”

“Hmm. Relationships between fathers and sons can be notoriously difficult, especially for two men who are as different as you and your father are.""Yes, and he's also the king--that makes our relationship impossible.”

“Shebna scraped the tablet clean and began drawing circles in the soft clay. "Suppose you had six figs and you ate two. How many would--""Four." Hezekiah answered before Shebna finished, and the tutor's thick black eyebrows rose in surprise."And suppose I had five figs. How many would we--""Nine.""Have you done this before?"Hezekiah thought the question was ridiculous. "I've eaten figs lots of times.”

“And he realized that this was their attitude toward Yahweh, too. They either hurried through life, ignoring Him, or they regarded Yahwey and His commandments with contempt.”

“Don't be fooled by strength you can see," he said at last. "Yahweh often hides His power in the simple things, the weak things, and so His strength seems foolish in man's eyes.”

“Only a coward would send his children to their deaths in order to save his own life.”

“The only way to revive Temple worship is through repentance. The men of Judah must give up their idolatry and turn their hearts back to God.”

“I have met people who truly do not believe in God, and they feel no anger when they see suffering. They are indifferent to it. But you and I are angry. Anger is not indifference. I blamed God because He took my family. But I couldn’t get revenge from God, so I turned my rage against other people. I wanted revenge. Someone must pay.”“You’re wrong.” Helen said, wanting desperately to believe that he was. “I told you, I no longer believe in God.”“Then why are you so angry with Him?” His eyes were so sorrowful that Helen had to look away. She was unable to reply. “You blame me and my country for your losses Miss Kimball. And I blame you and your country. But you and I are people, not countries. Did you kill my wife? My child? Would you put a gun to their heads and shoot them, or take away all of their food and watch them die? No, of course not. Neither would I kill someone you loved if I met him face to face. Wars come from bitterness and hatred. They are started by nations without face. But wars end when the hatred ends in the hearts of people like you and me. That is why I ask you to please forgive me.”

“Alliances with other nations lead to bondage," Zechariah explained. "Joseph started out as Pharaoh's trusted advisor in Egypt, but later generations ended up as slaves. And wasn't it Ahaz's so-called alliance with Assyria that led to our present slavery?”

“Love is the spice of life!" Aunt Lydia picked up her glass and took a long drink before setting it down again. "Did it end in heartache, dear?" "Well, yes...but it was the good kind of heart ache, Aunt Lydia. The kind where you'll always think fondly of each other, even though you know your love could never be." My aunt squealed with delight. "Ooh, I just love stories that end that way! Those happy, sappy endings in romance novels aren't realistic at all. But if you can gaze up at the stars at night and think fondly of your lost love, then it's worth falling in love and losing him." "You're absolutely right.”

“You know what I wish? I wish I could put time in a bottle and throw it into the ocean. Then I would have forever to spend with you. I wouldn’t need air to breathe or food to eat. Holding you in my arms would be all the food I would need. Having your love would be the only air I would need to breathe.”

“Happiness is something that comes from our own hearts, not from other people.”

“That's absurd," I said with a little laugh. "Nobody can read too much. That's like saying someone breathes too much.”

“I've seen spring come to the orchard every year as far back as I can remember and I've never grown tired of it. Oh, the wonder of it! The outrageous beauty! God didn't have to give us cherry blossoms you know. He didn't have to make apple trees and peach trees burst into flower and fragrance. But God just loves to splurge. He gives us all this magnificence and then, if that isn't enough, He provides fruit from such extravagance.”

“Faith don't come in a bushel basket, Missy. It come one step at a time. Decide to trust Him for one little thing today, and before you know it, you find out He's so trustworthy you be putting your whole life in His hands.”

“People are always thinking they can use the Lord to get their own way-- all they have to do is pray and God's gonna take away all their suffering and give them what they whatever they ask for. But it don't work that way. God's doing His business, and it's up to us to be serving Him, not the other way around."Then why do people pray at all? My papa asked Jesus to help him escape with me when I was just a little girl. But Jesus didn't help us."Praying ain't about asking for your own way. It's all about talking things over with God, just like you and me are talking things over. In the end, you have to be trusting the Lord to do what's best."So the Lord thought it was best that my papa died and my mama was sold?"Delia slowly shook her head. "I don't know, honey, I just don't know. The hardest thing of all to understand is why a loving God keeps letting us suffer... I don't know all the answers myself. I seen my share of suffering, believe me. But there two things I do know for sure. One is that God loves us... And the second thing is that God's always in control of everything that happens. When bad things come our way and it starts looking like He don't love us, all I can say is that maybe we ain't knowing everything He knows."Kitty's tears started falling again. "I still don't understand."Remember what you told me about the fighting up in Charleston? How you was standing on that porch, not able to see what's going on? This here's the same thing. We're standing in the smoke, hearing the noise [of the battle] all around us, and we don't know what God's doing because we can't see things clearly as He sees them. But He's gonna make everything turn our okay when the smoke clears. When it does, God's gonna be the winner and all our suffering here on earth is gonna finall make sense. We're gonna look in Jesus' face and say, 'O Lord, it was worth it all.”