Emotions can shipwreck your calling (click)

He knew that God didn’t call him to success but to faithfulness. 

"Beware of giving up too soon. Our emotions are not reliable guides."   John Piper   Courtesy ODB

I resist Him too often, too much (click)

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
--John Donne

God snuck him in!

“Your mercies are new every morning,” the prophet proclaimed (Lamentations 3:22, 23). Like Moses, we think God surely must be exhausted, upset, angry with us and the rest of the sinners surrounding us. But He’s not. His mercy is new every morning, and where sin abounds grace abounds more (Romans 5:20). For the above reasons, Moses could not enter the Promised Land. But God is so merciful and gracious that 1,500 years later, who stands on the Mount of Transfiguration in the Promised Land? Moses himself (Matthew 17:3). God snuck him in! Oh, the grace and goodness of our God! --Courson

The Shadow - harmless? 2 points of view

God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon . . . what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know You God because I am in the way.
--O'Connor, cited by Tim Keller     (see below)

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil...
Shadows can't hurt!  --Dr. James Merritt, cited by Pastor Tom Duchemin