I have taken up two pursuits with more frequency of late: Smoking cigars and inhaling grace. The latter being more perpetual … in desire. Enjoying either seems essential to the experience.

Following are a few quotes on Cigars and grace from tidbits of reading of two sojourners ..Charles Spurgeon and Brennan Manning. I would love to enjoy a cigar with both.

At some juncture I realize that the only thing I know I can do is receive His grace. I am currently making effort in prayer to acknowledging the receipt of His grace. It does seem at present that is often all I am able to muster spiritually. Perhaps there is a renewing foundation in doing so. I hope for that. On that of late I frequently ponder as I enjoy a cigar and stroll with the dog.

Ted

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“Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last ‘trick’, whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school.

‘But how?’ we ask.

Then the voice says, ‘They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’

There they are. There *we* are – the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life’s tribulations, but through it all clung to faith.

My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.”
― Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

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