Justin Welby Quotes

Sometimes you want to whisper in God's ear, 'God, we know you are in charge, but why don't you make it slightly more obvious?'

I look'd to Heav'n, and try'd to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust.

I'm one of those cliff-hanging Catholics. I don't believe in God, but I do believe that Mary was his mother.

With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil.

When I was a kid and I'd be in trouble. I'd ask God to help me, and then once the fire was out, I wouldn't talk to Him anymore. When I got older, I began to find I needed some help spiritually, just to function.

As a teenager, I increasingly had questions about religion to which I found no good answers.

I stopped going to church for awhile.

I questioned the blind faith demanded by my religion, which was Islam.

It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.

I think about God, yes, and I wonder if there is a God. And if there is a God, will God please help me through my hard trips.

God, I am trying to recover my faith. Please don't abandon me in the middle of this adventure, I prayed, pushing my fears aside.

Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts - there is just too much misery and cruelty for that.

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

If faith fails, prayer perishes.

God was someone I wound up turning over and over in my mind each night... Was He punishing me with this meal or was He rewarding me? Did He actively watch me or take me for granted like a fish you don't notice until it's floating on the surface of the tank?

Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.

A nominal Christian often discovers in suffering that his faith has been in his church, denomination, or family tradition, but not Christ. As he faces evil and suffering, he may lose his faith. But that’s actually a good thing. I have sympathy for people who lose their faith, but any faith lost in suffering wasn’t a faith worth keeping.

I looked around for God's judgments, but saw no signs of them.

Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.

Lord I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

O God, for as much as without Thee We are not enabled to doubt Thee, Help us all by Thy grace To convince the whole race It knows nothing whatever about Thee.

He has done things that caused me to doubt His wisdom, but never His existence.

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer.

I brought Sammy inside and put him to bed. Said his prayer with him. “‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.