How will you be able to lift up your heart to God? Does your heart not need first to be healed before you can come to see God? Are you not revealing your pride when you cry out, “First let me see and then I will be healed”?

—Augustine, Commentary on Psalm 39, 21

God loved the people of this world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has faith in him will have eternal life and never really die. God did not send his Son into the world to condemn its people. He sent him to save them! No one who has faith in God’s Son will be condemned. But everyone who doesn’t have faith in him has already been condemned for not having faith in God’s only Son. The light has come into the world, and people who do evil things are judged guilty because they love the dark more than the light. People who do evil hate the light and won’t come to the light, because it clearly shows what they have done. But everyone who lives by the truth will come to the light, because they want others to know that God is really the one doing what they do.

—John 3:16-21 (CEV)

As the whole story of Christendom shows, if everything is asked for, everything—and more—will be accorded; if little, then nothing.

—Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God

Truer words were never spoken. Christianity only fails when those who profess to believe it and proclaim it to others actually do not. Most folks instinctively know a farce when they see it and Christianity is no farce.

Most of our conflicts and difficulties come from trying to deal with the spiritual and practical aspects of our life separately instead of realising them as parts of one whole. If our practical life is centred on our own interests, cluttered up by possessions, distracted by ambitions, passions, wants, and worries, beset by a sense of our own rights and importance, or anxieties for our own future, or longings for our own success, we need not expect that our spiritual life will be a contrast to all this. The soul’s house is not built on such a convenient plan: there are few soundproof partitions to it.

—Evelyn Underhill, The Spiritual Life

If you are interested in helping the people of Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake there, the Anglican Relief and Development Fund is one venue to do that. Pray too for the people of Haiti.

UPDATE: This via email from the AR&DF

January 22, 2010

Anglicans have donated more than $70,000 through the Anglican Relief and Development Fund to support immediate relief in Haiti in the first week following the earthquake that struck the impoverished island nation on January 12.

According to Nancy Norton, executive director of Anglican Relief and Development Fund, the organization is partnering with World Relief, a large and well established evangelical Christian relief agency.  Working with World Relief ensures that these donations have an immediate positive effect in Haiti, where current estimates are that more than 200,000 have died and more than a million people are without shelter in the aftermath of the earthquake.

World Relief has had a long presence in Haiti, empowering the local church with health, economic and social development projects.  World Relief’s Disaster Response team is providing urgent medical care to hundreds of injured people at the Kings Hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s devastated capital.  They have also set up feeding centers in partnership with local churches, providing thousands of hot meals to hungry earthquake survivors.  Volunteers from local Haitian churches are operating the centers.  World Relief can feed a person two meals a day – lunch and dinner – for less than $2.  It costs approximately $375 to feed 200 people rice and beans at lunch and milk porridge for dinner.

“Thank you to everyone who contributed through Anglican Relief and Development to help in Haiti.  The generosity of our donors has been overwhelming.  This financial outpouring will allow us to not only assist in immediate relief work, but also to be part of the rebuilding process through development projects in Haiti later this year.  The needs in this terribly damaged nation will continue,” said Norton.

Donations for our continued work there can be made online at www.anglicanaid.net or by sending a check to the Anglican Relief and Development Fund at:

ARDF
PO Box 3830
Pittsburgh, PA 15230-3830