Teach Us to Number Our Days Quotes

“Here’s the thing: What I hold in my mind will, in time, show up in my face, for as George MacDonald once pointed out, the face is “the surface of the mind.” If I cling to bitterness and resentment, if I tenaciously hold a grudge, if I fail to forgive, my countenance will begin to reflect those angry moods. My mother used to tell me that a mad look might someday freeze on my face. She was wiser than she knew.”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days

“God is never in a hurry, but He does mean business. He will finish the work as soon as He can. “But” we say, “I have wasted so much of my life. Can I still be of use?” God wastes nothing, not even our sins. When acknowledged, they humble us and make us more merciful to others in their weakness. We can become more approachable, more useful to God and to others. Indeed, each loss has its own compensation.”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days

“Some folks try to romanticize youth, but I don’t remember it that way. “Carefree youth” is an oxymoron to me. My adolescence was a perfectly miserable time—years when I tore down family traditions and my inhibitions and prostituted the strength and vigor of youth on myself. I was an “angel-like spright with black sinne,” John Donne would say, and lived with my fair share of guilt and self-reproach. Thus I pray with David, “Remember not the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways.”33 “If only I could live my life over again,” we say, “I would do better.” Not likely. A fresh start for any of us would amount to almost nothing without the experience necessary to make the right adjustments. “The light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us,” Coleridge said.”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days

“I have a friend, a Catholic priest, who served as Mother Teresa’s translator when she was here in the United States to address the United Nations. I was in his study one day and spied a picture of the two of them standing together on the streets of New York. I marveled again at her ancient, wrinkled, leathered, lined face, utterly unadorned. Wisdom had softened her face; character had drawn its lines. Gazing at those marks of courage and kindness, I thought: Is there anyone more homely—or more beautiful? Hers was the beauty of holiness. May it be ours as well.”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days

“I re-read John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress the other day and came across this passage: “After this, Mr. Ready-to-halt called for his fellow-pilgrims, and told them, saying, I am sent for, and God shall surely visit you also. So he desired Mr. Valiant to make his will. And because he had nothing to bequeath to them that should survive him but his crutches, and his good wishes, therefore thus he said: These crutches I bequeath to my son that shall tread in my steps, with a hundred warm wishes that he may prove better than I have been.”30 My staffs and crutches I bequeath to our three sons. 23”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days

“Lord With a crooked stick for a cane I’m limping home. Mocked and maligned Stooped and stupid Soiled and shabby I limp toward You. —Ruth Harms Calkin”
― David Roper, Teach Us to Number Our Days