A Year Lost and Found Quotes

“After the resurrection Jesus stood among them and said 'Peace be unto you'. For them it was the final proof that everything he had said about the Father's love was true; yet he still bore the marks of the nails in his hands and the spear in his side.

Jesus did not offer people perfect health and a painless death. Human minds and bodies are fragile and vulnerable. What he offers is eternal life: a new relationship with God of such a quality that nothing that may happen to us can destroy it. And it is that kind of confidence and trust in God, come what may, which is the true healing of the human spirit.”
― Michael Mayne, A Year Lost and Found

“Life is not about fairness or unfairness. It is often unjust, claiming the good and the innocent as its victims. Life is about making certain choices: between one action and another, between generous self-giving and selfish holding back; and it is also about what we make of the harsh, unlooked-for blows that come to us all: sickness and pain, grief and old age. None of us dare judge the life of another: that is God's prerogative, and his judgement is matched by his mercy. Those who become embittered or lose their faith or take their own life in despair may have had the dice loaded against them from the start, and none of us know whether we should have survived if we had been in their place. All I would dare claim is that it is good if we learn from our own experience of suffering or bereavement, and as a result are wiser, more tolerant, above all more compassionate. There are those who are able to use their sickness, their pain, even their dying as a time for growth and a new-found trust in the God who holds us in death as in life and will not let us go. And perhaps they are not as rare as we think.”
― Michael Mayne, A Year Lost and Found

“Jesus Christ does not only change our idea of what God is and what we might become: he also changes our idea of what love is. For 'the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord' is not a love which is soft and yielding and emotional. This love is diamond-hard and costly; it is a giving of yourself to others; it is a refusal to hate, whatever the cost; it is a refusal to be moved from what you know in your heart to be good and true and right. Love is quite often a kind of dying. It demands obedience and loyalty, and it may well encompass anguish, pain and even death.”
― Michael Mayne, A Year Lost and Found

“Waiting on God is hard when you are dispirited by illness. But part of waiting on God, learning to be passive in a way creative for your inner life, is not a question of thinking about God, but of growing in stillness. It has to do with prayer, and with music or from the simple contemplation of the world about you.”
― Michael Mayne, A Year Lost and Found

“The image of God is to be seen in us—as it was in Jesus—equally in our active lives, in our work and our creativity, and in our passive lives, by the way in which we accept and respond to the things that are done to us. Or indeed, as we grow old, or as we endure illness, by our response to the things which are done for us. This means that those forced to be inactive by lack of work or handicap or illness or old age need not feel they are of any less value as human beings. Rather, this time can be seen as a true and creative sharing in the nature of a God who himself became powerless and vulnerable.”
― Michael Mayne, A Year Lost and Found

“The only advice I have ever wanted to give is this: 'If it is in your nature to do so be a little vulnerable. Don't be afraid to talk about yourself, your journey, your pain, your vision.”
― Michael Mayne, A Year Lost and Found