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Archive for the ‘Anthony Bloom’ Category

Rights to Complain

Posted in Anthony Bloom, Prayer, Quotes on October 2, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Anthony Bloom

“If you look at the relationship in terms of mutual relationship, you will see that God could complain about us a great deal more than we about Him.

We complain that He does not make himself present to us for the few minutes we reserve for Him, but what about the twenty-three and a half hours during which God may be knocking at our door and we answer ‘I am busy, I am sorry’…

So there is a situation in which we have no right to complain of the absence of God because we are a great deal more absent than He ever is.” — Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray, page 4-5

Purpose to make yourself available to Jesus when there is a stirring in heart; these will be the sweetest times of prayer.

— fritz@langgang.com

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Praising Without Feelings

Posted in Anthony Bloom, Feelings, Love, Praise, Quotes, tagged on May 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Anthony Bloom

Some think it insincere to offer praise to God without the corresponding feelings.

Anthony Bloom (1914 – 2003), Archbishop in the Orthodox Church, has good insight here.

When you live in your family, and you work out of doors and are doing a heavy kind of work, you may come back physically worn out. If at that moment your mother, your sister, your father or whoever else, said ‘Do you love me?’ you would say ‘I do.’

If the other person goes on investigating, ‘Do you really love me at this moment?’ what you could honestly have said is ‘No, I feel nothing but my aching back and worn out body.’ But you are perfectly right in saying ‘I love you’ because you know that underneath all exhaustion, there is a live current of love.
– Beginning to Pray, page 35-36

It is that way with God. For one reason or another we don’t always feel our love for him but there is, still, a live current of love.

Prayer:Father, I thank you there is a live current of love in me for you and yours, even when I don’t always feel it.

Sound Bite: The live current of Love for Christ is deeper than my surface feelings.

– fritz@langgang.com

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How to Connect Life and Prayer

Posted in Anthony Bloom, Prayer, Quotes, tagged on April 28, 2011| 2 Comments »

Anthony Bloom

Take a moment to read and consider this prescription for connecting life and prayer; I think you will be blessed, I was!

Prayer arises from two sources: either from our wonder at God and the things of God …or else from the sense of tragedy, our own, and especially other people’s.  But otherwise? At other times life and prayer must be made one. For instance, get up in the morning, stand before God and say: «Lord, bless me, and bless this day that is beginning», and then treat the whole day as a gift of God and consider yourself as God’s envoy in this unknown which is the new day.

This simply means something very difficult: that nothing which happens today will be alien to the will of God: everything without exception is a situation in which God will have placed you in order that you should be His presence, his love, his compassion, his creative intelligence, his courage… And on the other hand, every time you encounter a situation, you will be the one whom God has put there to perform the office of a Christian, to be a particle of the body of Christ and an action of God.

If you do that, you will easily see that at every moment you will have to turn to God and say: «Lord, clarify my intelligence, strengthen and direct my will, give me a heart of fire, help me.» At other moments you may say: «Thank you, Lord!» And if you are wise and know how to be thankful, you will avoid the folly that is called vanity or pride, which consists of imagining that one has done something that one could have left undone. It is God who has done it. It is God who has given us this marvelous gift of having that to do.

And when in the evening you present yourself again before God and make a quick examination of the day, you will be able to sing his praises, glorify Him, thank Him, weep over others and weep over yourself.

If you begin to connect your prayer to life in this way, the two will never again be separated

– Anthony Bloom, September 2, 1967

Sound Bite: You are the one God put there to perform the office of a Christian”

– fritz@langgang.com
Read Metropolitan Anthony’s whole message here.
Related Post: God is At Work – Feburary 24, 2011

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