(Today’s Microfiction Monday post is below.)

Melissa at Breath of Life hosts a weekly carnival called The Week In Words,which involves sharing some words from your reading. Melissa explains,

“Playing along is simple, just write a post of the quote(s) that spoke to you during the week (attributed, of course) and link back here [at Melissa‘s]. They can be from any written source, i.e. magazine, newspaper, blog, book. The only requirement is that they be words you read.”

I like this idea because I often will see a quote that really speaks to me, but then I forget it. Just recording them here helps me remember them a little better.

The first one is from a friend’s Facebook profile:

“The gospel comes to the sinner at once with nothing short of complete forgiveness as the starting-point of all his efforts to be holy. It does not say, ‘Go and sin no more, and I will not condemn thee.’ It says at once, ‘Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more.’”  — Horatius Bonar

Amen.

This one I saw at Ribtickler and traced back to Stephen Hume’s column in the Vancouver Sun.

“What matters is not the medal count, it’s simply that these remarkable young people—from Canada or from anywhere else—qualified and then showed up and did their best against the world’s best. Everybody can’t finish with a gold medal; most who strive must always settle for satisfactions that don’t even include medals. But it’s their striving that creates the winner’s glory.”  — Stephen Hume

I love this. Often when Jesse played basketball, I just prayed for each team to their best. And even those who didn’t win gold in the Olympics contributed to the sport, the competition, and their own stretching, growth, and development.

Finally, in Parting the Waters:Finding Beauty in Brokenness by Jeanne Damoff, which I am currently reading, she writes in section about a situation that was not bad in itself but was causing problems for some and was being used “to stir up lies and jealousy”:

We’d escaped any permanent damage, but a sobering thought struck me. With all the prayer surrounding our family, how had these darts found a chink in the armor?

I remembered a verse. “Satan is like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” Satan doesn’t fight fair. Often, he takes something good — something God has done — and perverts it into an instrument of destruction.

So perceptive, and so true. We need God’s grace not just to watch out for the “big things” but also the little things that could lead to big things.

Read anything lately that struck you in a particular way that you’d like to remember? You can visit Melissa’s for more or to link up with your own quotes.