Quotes from Jim Elliot

Thanks to Rita I'm reading Jim Elliot's Journals and I'm loving them!
They're so insightful yet simple, convicting yet encouraging, and beautiful.
It's such a bessing to have people like him to look to as examples and it's a real blessing to have their actual journals to go to in order to find out what they were really like. I'm thankful that I can read his journal but I'm embarressed to think of someone reading mine.
He was by no means a perfect person but he was an example of trying to be where God wanted him, doing what God wanted him to be doing. That's as much as any of us can do. It's just encouraging to see how it has happened in someone elses life before you.
Another thing that I've been convicted of while reading is that he strove so hard to be in the word constantly. And not only that but to really understand it and love it. He didn't always understand it or love it judging by his journals but he continually reminded himself to try.
I frequently forget how closely related people are to eachother in their thoughts and feelings. I don't forget that other people suffer or struggle but I forget that they do it in much the same way I do. I foolishly and selfishly start thinking that these thoughts or feelings are new ones. I'm completely wrong. By reading his journals I've already discovered many things he says that I've thought about myself.
He was a young man writing these things in 1948 and I shouldn't have anything in common with him, right? And yet I do. I'm not trying to compare myself to him or belittle what he did or who he was but sometimes, I think, we forget how simular we all are to one another in or innermost areas of our minds and hearts.
Anyway enough ramblings. I've only just begun to read the book and have a long way to go. I know I'll have lots more thoughts and quotes from it later on but I leave you with some quotes that I've come accross already.

"God, I pray, light these idle sticks of my life and may I burn up for Thee. Consume my life, my God, for it is Thine. I seek not a long life but a full one like Your's, Lord Jesus."

"O God, save me from a life of barrenness, following a formal pattern of ethics called Theism and give instead that vital contact of the soul with Thy divine life that fruit may be produced and Life-abudant living may be known again as the final proof for Christ's message and work!"

"Yes, send persecution to me, Lord, that my life might bring forth much fruit."

"As the bush burned and was not consumed, so God enters a man and peforms a miracle. God is an eternal burning and when He makes His abode with a man, He allows that man to become a witness to His power without being consumed by His person."

"Mark my ear, Lord, that it might respond only to Thy voice."