The Quotable Susan

Quotes on Prayer:

“I say it reverently, if God were stupid enough or weak enough to answer every prayer we made, I think we should have to stop praying or become much more wise than we are now. We should be about as safe on our knees as at the controls of one of our great bomber planes –loaded.”

 -Susan Anderson from her book “So This Is Africa”

“There are some prayers that have not been granted, and I cannot understand why.  As my human eye sees, there are a number of persons who would be very much happier and better off in every way if the Lord could only see eye to eye with me and answer my prayers concerning them.  So far He has not, and that’s all I know about it.  But I do not plan to give up trying to learn to pray.”

-Susan Anderson from her book, “So This Is Africa”

“Ask with a focused mind and an engaged will.  Seek with the objective of attaining.  Knock with urgent sincerity.

 -Susan Small (a friend)

 

“Whenever, I find myself suddenly awake in the middle of the night with someone on my mind, I pray for them, because I think to myself, ‘Either God does wake His children up in the middle of the night to pray for someone or He doesn’t. But if He does, then this is what it would look like.’”

-Susan Siami

 

“People who ski, I suppose, are people who happen to like skiing, who have time for skiing… Recently, I found that I often treat prayer as though it were a sport like skiing - something you do if you like it, something you do in your spare time…. But prayer isn’t a sport. It’s work.  Prayer is not a game…Prayer is the opposite of leisure. It’s something to be engaged in, not indulged in. It’s a job you give priority to. It’s performing when you have energy left for nothing else.”

 -Elizabeth Elliott as quoted by Chip Ingram in his book, “The Invisible War”

 

 

The Quotable Susan

Quotes from my friend Susan and other equally “famous” people.

Quotes about God

“It is not the level of spirituality that you can depend on, it is God and nothing less than God. For the work is God’s, and the call is God’s, and everything is summoned by Him and to His purposes; the whole scene, the whole mess, the whole package –our bravery, our cowardice, our strengths, and our weaknesses. The God who could take a murderer like Moses, an adulterer like David, and a traitor like Peter and make of them strong servants of His is a God who can redeem savage Indians using as the instruments of His peace a conglomeration of sinners who sometimes look like heroes and sometimes look like villains.”

-Elizabeth Elliott from her book “Through Gates of Splendor”


“I know I cannot trust in anything other than God…certainly not in not dying which is not guaranteed. Safety is not the basis of trust. Instead, our faith needs to be in God, inexplicable God, dangerous God, other than ourselves God, who does not order this world according to our will but knows more than we do and loves more deeply.”

-Dr. Jennifer Myhre (missionary to Uganda during the 2007 Ebola outbreak)


Susan’s response when I told her that I felt as if I was pestering God over and over with the same requests; “I know, I do it too. I say, ‘Ok God, Let’s just go over this one more time; you’re God and I am not. You can do something about my concerns and I can’t. So teach me to release it to you.”

-Susan Siami (friend)