We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking, only to learn that it is God who is shaking them.
What we are is God's gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.
Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.
The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar. It was natural that, bereft and desperate as I was, in the throes of unremitting suffering. I should turn to God
I will never turn to God.
This is one of the great paradoxes of suffering. Those who don't suffer much think suffering should keep people from God, while many who suffer a great deal turn to God, not from him.
At their core, when things really matter, people see a need to turn to God for strength and protection.
But however long you may have continued in rebellion, and how ever black and long the catalog of your sins, yet if you will now turn to God by a sincere repentance, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you shall not be cast out.
There are two kinds of death, the death which is inevitable and common to all beings, and the death which is voluntary and particular to certain ones of them only. It is the second death which is prescribed for us in the words of the Messenger of Allah: "Die before you die." The resurrection is accomplished for him who dies this voluntary death. His affairs return to God and they are but one. He has returned to God and he sees Him through Him. As the Prophet said - on him be Grace and Peace!
Your most profound and intimate experiences of worship will likely be in your darkest days - when your heart is broken, when you feel abandoned, when your out of options, when the pain is great - and you turn to God alone.
There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he resorts to mere expedients and tricks the opportunity is lost. He comes out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But, if he turns to God, the hour of suffering is the turning hour of his life.
...the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
When you turn to God you discover He has been facing you all the time.
Human nature is such that humans can turn to God anywhere at any time, and by believing in His care and protection, and thinking in accordance with this belief, fill their hearts with peace and poise, rebuild their bodies into health and strength, and surround themselves with harmonious and joyous conditions.
Today, when people say they cannot believe, it is not a mental problem; it is a matter of the will of the heart- they do not want to believe. Some say they have certain 'mental reservations,' mental hurdles which they cannot get over. My friend, your mind is not big enough to take even one little hurdle. The problem is never in the mind but in the will. There is sin in the life, and a man does not want to turn to God; he does not want to believe Him.
Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.
Many people correctly make the point that our only hope is to turn to God. For example, Charles Lindbergh, who said that in his young manhood he thought "science was more important than either man or God," and that "without a highly developed science modern man lacks the power to survive," . . . went to Germany after the war to see what Allied bombing had done to the Germans, who had been leaders in science. There, he says, "I learned that if his civilization is to continue, modern man must direct the material power of his science by the spiritual truths of his God."
The Church encourages those in power to be truly at the service of the common good of their peoples. She urges financial leaders to take account of ethics and solidarity. And why should they not turn to God to draw inspiration from his designs? In this way, a new political and economic mindset would arise that would help to transform the absolute dichotomy between the economic and social spheres into a healthy symbiosis.
If a man has no worries about himself at all for the sake of love toward God and the working of good deeds, knowing that God is taking care of him, this is a true and wise hope. But if a man takes care of his own business and turns to God in prayer only when misfortunes come upon him which are beyond his power, and then he begins to hope in God, such a hope is vain and false. A true hope seeks only the Kingdom of God... the heart can have no peace until it obtains such a hope. This hope pacifies the heart and produces joy within it.
One of the greatest possible sins would be to return to God the life which he has given us with our abilities undiscovered and our talents undeveloped an unutilized. One of Jesus most bitter rebukes was given to him who buried his talents in the ground.
or simply:
