Grimrack Quotes

So in a man’s mind, he appraises, negotiates, defines, delineates, weighs the information, and that includes God. As you can see, this is a relationship of management, not trust. You don’t trust things you can manage, you manage them. And so, God as information is managed and no relationship of trust is fostered.

~ Geoffrey Wood

At the same time, they find their mind-god has played a trick on them. For mind is a part of the very system it has closed around it, and being inside, there is no reason to think any statement made by some part concerning the whole has any validity. Mind was caused by the material universe, if mind is right. But only the greater can accurately define the lesser, never the other way round, so if mind is right, mind would never know.

~ Geoffrey Wood

The more we train a man to labor, deliberate, dictate and demand over the inconsequential, the less capable his mind becomes of holding that of consequence.

~ Geoffrey Wood

When sex was something godlike, Lust was the profane curiosity that killed many a straying cat. Now, having removed mystery, Lust is less a long-standing, overpowering yearning, more a sudden craving of the appetite. Less quest, more impulse buy.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Joy is that paradox where a man so trusts, is so enraptured, as to be caught up and lost in the other, while at the same time, being utterly known by the other, thus utterly himself.

~ Geoffrey Wood

In Joy, to lose one’s life is to gain it, and Joy never loses an opportunity to be lost in the other.

~ Geoffrey Wood

They think that if they had more belief they would pray more, so keep them lacking. Never let them realize that the opposite is true: If they prayed more, they would have more belief.

~ Geoffrey Wood

But here I’d like to add to what the Tempter’s Manual suggests. Depression, at its finest, is not a Future that they cannot hopefully construct, nor a shamed Past that hounds them, but an agonizing Present that they cannot escape. We want to disable their Present so that they cannot use it to look Heavenward.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Somehow they fail to see that for someone aggravated by depression, self-help will be useless, indeed, it is precisely the self that needs to be forgotten.

~ Geoffrey Wood

They scold their own hearts but it actuates no real change, only deepens the wound. But they can’t look away from it. Thus, by paralyzing their Present, we beat The Adversary on His home turf. And loop after loop, the depressed haunt and harrow themselves, sometimes for years, when they have only, for a brief moment, to look away from themselves, to look up.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Properly understood, Imagination and Prayer are directly proportional —the more they pray beyond their bounds, they expand their vision beyond their resources, their experiences, their expectations.

~ Geoffrey Wood

When some one mortal yet eternal human merely being relying on precisely nothing but the audacious love of his Maker, calls on Him to part the Heavens, well, we are undone.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Faith is where they learn about their God, but Prayer is where they explore Him.

~ Geoffrey Wood

True Prayer is the work of relationship, where He moves them from mere information about Him to a one-on-one experience with Him, so that now when they talk about “knowing God,” they mean more than, “I understand what you’re saying about God,” but also, “It fits my experience of Him.

~ Geoffrey Wood

When young, the humans are all Imagination because Memory is so much smaller a part of their experience, so little of them is grounded in it. As they grow older, however, Memory overtakes their Imagination, outweighs it. But when they pray with ever increasing confidence, they see with an ever-increasing and youthful Imagination and such burgeoning of possibility causes even their Memory to be lightened and redeemed. The scales fall from their eyes and they wait on their Father with the same childlike wonder that watches a sunrise to see what might happen this time.

~ Geoffrey Wood

All this has been happening around them all the days of their lives though they couldn’t see it, then one day, Prayer removes the veil and everything changes. Think of it this way: Picture a man whistling a tune, when out of nowhere, first a harmony joins, then another, and then suddenly he is taken up into a whirlwind of music, countless instruments playing soaring complexities that the man’s whistling is, indeed, a part of, but now he begins to see how small a part; the longer he listens, he realizes that his is not the melody and where he had thought he was whistling alone, the truth had always been the music playing, though never before that moment heard, and now what had been noise becomes symphony.

~ Geoffrey Wood

The eye is to light as the soul is to God.

~ Geoffrey Wood

There is a mathematics to all his relationships, underlying each and every one. He wants it to all add up in his head and he wants to do the adding. And should someone step outside his ciphers, the circle his mind has drawn, his trust evaporates.

~ Geoffrey Wood

The Adversary, of course, simply wants them to lay down their sins, guilt and all, and follow Him. But this type holds on to their sinfulness and their guilt for it, because otherwise, they’d have no relationship with Him at all. And, of course, no relationship can be based on guilt and survive.

~ Geoffrey Wood

And once their imaginations are liberated, they begin glimpse the grand interconnectedness of all things. Eternity begins to peek out from behind the everyday things and they see the trappings of any earthly moment as the stage and props for Heaven to reveal itself. There is now nothing ordinary. Everything is being used and spun out for His vast scheme and in His eternal economy, nothing is wasted. Suddenly, all the myriad moments and minutiae of a lifetime show their orchestration —there was nothing that did not lead to this! They look over all their time to find that His redemption has always been rushing, swooping, swerving through their experience, racing to and fro to intervene and infuse Grace.

~ Geoffrey Wood

When their minds mingle with His magnanimity, something of eternity rubs off on their imaginations.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: “What-Would-Jesus-Buy”—well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.

~ Geoffrey Wood

And keep them thinking in terms of 'being good' as this is not an end so much as a means to something else —happiness, respect, self-esteem, etc… And whatever their true end is, take it away, and so goes their goodness.

~ Geoffrey Wood

If we blind them to The Adversary —decrease their desire for The Desire— while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing “freedom of choice,” then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.

~ Geoffrey Wood

They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Though I despise it, I do not doubt His Love for the creatures. I have seen it —His ever-reaching outward for any hand that might reach back. At His love, I tremble yet believe.

~ Geoffrey Wood

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook —that prissy little virtue, Temperance— for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.

~ Geoffrey Wood

The Bible is the one book we’ve most succeeded in having them never read as a book. Keep it that way.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Still, despite all our noise, this universe hinges on a melody, that’s the dismal truth of it. Oh, we can propagandize all we wish, it doesn’t change the fabric of things. This universe was not made for the fallen, only the redeemed.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Also, always encourage 'being good' over 'doing good.' Acts of goodness are the difficulty for us and should, of course, be avoided. 'Being good' is far less problematic, largely because it lacks definition and can be solely a state of mind completely unattached to reality.

~ Geoffrey Wood

I don’t even like the phrase ‘opportunity to sin’ because it implies the opportunity to obey.

~ Geoffrey Wood

I shouldn’t need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn’t think to stop it?

~ Geoffrey Wood

It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn’t mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude.

~ Geoffrey Wood

That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary’s greatest curatives —gratitude.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Gratitude, not guilt, as motivation is always His starting point, thus guilt as a motivation leads nowhere.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would’ve worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would’ve then better lead them on to happiness.

~ Geoffrey Wood