"He must increase, but I must decrease."
John 3:30"There is no limit to what God can do through a person who does not care who gets the credit. Self is the greatest enemy of usefulness. The moment I step aside, the stream flows through."
-- Charles Spurgeon
"The self must be surrendered. Not diminished, not crushed -- surrendered. For what we give up is not our true self but the false self that has been holding the true self hostage. In losing ourselves we find the very self we were made to be."
-- Blaise Pascal, *Pensées*
"Two ways there are, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two ways. The way of life is this: first, you shall love God who made you; second, your neighbor as yourself; and whatever you would not have done to you, do not do to another. The teaching of these words is this: Bless those who curse you, and pray for your enemies, and fast for those who persecute you. For what credit is it to you if you love those who love you? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? But love those who hate you, and you will not have an enemy."
-- The Didache, Chapter 1
"We must know before we can love. In order to know God, we must often think of Him. And when we come to love Him, we shall then also think of Him often, for the heart is with our treasure. This is the great science of the spiritual life -- to go beyond all knowledge into the simplicity of love, to practice the presence of God not as a technique but as a returning, again and again, to the One who never left."
-- Brother Lawrence, *The Practice of the Presence of God*
What if the thing you are most afraid of losing is the very thing that is keeping you from becoming who you were made to be?
"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult. And what is the greatest daring? To require nothing of fortune, to be ready to renounce whatever is taken from us, to say to Nature, as she gives and takes away: 'I shall neither be cast down by what you give nor count as loss what you take. I do not accept it as a gift, but hold it as a loan.'"
-- Seneca, *Letters to Lucilius*, Letter 120
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