Essence Atkins Quotes

Seeds of faith are always within us; sometimes it takes a crisis to nourish and encourage their growth.

I am very happy. Extremely, blissfully so. Even in my pain, I'm happy. I like crying. It makes me feel alive. Challenges, when you're in a tumultuous situation, are an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to get closer to God, an opportunity to find and kind of reform yourself, and to figure out what really matters and what your priorities are. Not that I'm welcoming tribulation, but I find that it is beneficial.

Faith must be tested, because it can be turned into a personal possession only through conflict.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I'm on course, and I'm doing what God wants me to do. I'm real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

I was raised as a Christian but the transaction has to be made by yourself - you and God - at some point.

Indeed, this life is a test. It is a test of many things - of our convictions and priorities, our faith and our faithfulness, our patience and our resilience, and in the end, our ultimate desires.

I found the purpose of my existence, and also the purpose of my circumstance. There's a purpose for why you're in the fire. If God can use a man without arms and legs to be His hands and feet, then He will certainly use any willing heart!

When you face the perils of weariness, carelessness, and confusion, don't pray for an easier life. Pray instead to be a stronger man or woman of God.

God already knows what we're made of, but perhaps He wants us to learn what we're made of. I think we would all agree that we learn more from our tough times than from our easy times.

Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.

In that I found being able to talk to my family about my feelings, praying for strength and realizing that our lives have a deep purpose and the journey of our lives is to find out what that is and express it, was the only way I could have gotten through it.

Seven and half years ago I began my own journey. For me and my family it was a time of adversity. But during that adversity I derived a deeper faith. And born out of that adversity was a commitment to devote myself to those people and to those issues that truly matter to me.

I have gone through a period of seeking to understand what or how strong or what are the connections I have to God.

I wouldn't have really committed myself to any kind of spiritual lifestyle, I don't think, if I had not endured great suffering. I think that's the case with a lot of people.

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.

There is strength deep bedded in our hearts, of which we reck but little till the shafts of heaven have pierced its fragile dwelling. Must not earth be rent before her gems are found?

Through my handicaps, I have found my self, my work, my God.

When I asked God for strength, He gave me difficult situations to face.

Every problem is a character-building opportunity, and the more difficult it is, the greater the potential for building spiritual muscle and moral fiber.

If God allows you to be stripped of the exterior portions of your life, He means for you to cultivate the interior

When things fall apart in your life, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.

Adversity is an opportunity for self-discovery.

There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he resorts to mere expedients and tricks the opportunity is lost. He comes out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But, if he turns to God, the hour of suffering is the turning hour of his life.

Adversity always presents opportunities for introspection.