There is nothing you need to do differently to be lovable — no emotional debt you have to pay, no change you have to make. Know this like you know your own voice, your own pulse.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 195
Photo: Monet’s Garden, Giverny, France, June 22, 2026
The glorious message of Scripture is that we do not have to be perfect for our Maker to love us. All through the great stories, heavenly love is lavished on visibly imperfect people. Scripture asks us to look at Jacob as he really is, to look at ourselves as we really are, and then realize that this is who God loves. God did not love Jacob because he was a cheat, but because he was Jacob. God loves us in our complex isness, and when we get stuck on the image of the totally virtuous and morally perfect person we will never be, we are unable to accept this unqualified love, or to love other people in their rich complexity.
If God can love Jacob – or any single one of us – as we really are, then it is possible for us to turn in love to those who hurt or confuse us. Those we know and those we do not know. And that makes me take a new look at love.
— Madeleine L’Engle, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 194-195
Photo: Étretat, France, June 23, 2026
I firmly believe that God wants us to leave sin behind, but not because he is some malicious legalist holding every human to an impossible moral standard or because he flies off the handle in anger anytime we do something wrong. God hates sin because sin hurts us. And God hates to see us get hurt.
— Zach W. Lambert, Better Ways to Read the Bible, p. 92
Photo: Parc Botanique de Haut Bretagne, France, June 18, 2026
First, the church needs to stand as a counter-witness to all dehumanizing and nauseating propaganda. Jesus spoke powerfully and directly to this calling as his central message in the Sermon on the Mount: we are taught to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. The vocation of every Christian and of the church as a whole is to stand always against the dehumanization of any person or group. Even when we rightly understand a group or person to be a legitimate threat or to be engaging in active harm, we are tasked with never losing sight of their humanity, their possession of the imago Dei, and the unconditional and undying love that God has for them. Beyond that, the church has been taught to embrace an “upside down” view of the social order wherein those that our community deems least worthy of honor and dignity – the oppressed, poor, and marginalized – are understood to be the very people whom we are most honored to count as members of our body.
— Paul Hoard and Billie Hoard, Eucontamination, p. 192-193
Photo: Cloister, Mont Saint-Michel, France, June 18, 2026.
There are a lot of things I cannot be certain of, but I am certain that God is not fragile. Nor is God in the business of creating subjugated people with no liberty to question or to wonder. Arguing not only with God but also with God’s sacred text is a path toward our liberation, a way of pushing back against the forces of injustice that plague us.
Humans are thinking and feeling creatures, passionate at times, and the Spirit of God invites all of that – all the critical thinking, all the deep engagement, all the reasoning together – into the relationship we have together. This intimacy, this authenticity, goes to the very heart of what it is to know and be known by Spirit.
If you can bare your angst, your frustrations, your disagreements, and your dread to someone, yet they are unshaken, what sort of healing and liberation might be found with this person? How much more so should this be true with the divine? To argue with God is to belong to God; it is to embrace a love that surpasses all understanding – and be transformed by it.
— Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging, p. 62
Photo: Giverny, France, June 16, 2026
But this story of ultimate reconciliation is not just a stack of Bible verses. It is a key theme of the whole Bible, and it is essential to how we relate to God. We connect to God and love God because God first loves us. God is not a punisher; God is a healer. We fail, but God’s steadfast love “endures forever” – Psalms 136 repeats this truth twenty-six times! The redundant message doesn’t make for the most subtle poetry, but some truths need to be drilled into thick skulls. Despite the way that Christian history shows how we are experts at missing the point, those who know God best have always known that at the very heart of God is unfailing love.
— Brian Recker, Hell Bent, p. 104-105
Photo: Mont Saint-Michel, June 17, 2026
Please remember that certainty – not doubt – is the opposite of faith. The insistence on certainty reveals a need for control, not a need for love or understanding. Historians agree that much violence in human history has been religiously based, the predictable collision of two absolutely certain or dogmatic worldviews. Those views can be relied on to give us certitudes about our superiority, our judgments, and our actions, and they are also our most reliable justifications for scapegoating others. In light of such thinking, punishment becomes a moral mandate. If we are the loved ones and the “best,” then the ever-present other has to be punished or eliminated. These are the obstacles to love that must be shaved away in all of us.
— Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things, p. 154
Photo: Cliffs of Étretat, June 23, 2026
In story after story, Jesus reveals all the ways we’ve misunderstood and misrepresented God. This is the good news: God loves us and is here to rescue us, not to condemn us. Cast away the old visions of bearded Zeus, of paternalistic punishers, of Bible verses as weapons, of faraway fear coming home to roost, of switches and beatings described as love. Such things aren’t love. They never were.
The love of God isn’t a far-off destination we are striving to arrive at. Nor is it a prize that will be given to us only if we earn it. It’s not for the winners or the ones with answered prayers. It’s not just for the ones clutching their pearls over you. It’s not just for one denomination or church or religion. Now, we are all loved now.
— Sarah Bessey, Field Notes for the Wilderness, p. 62.
Photo: Zweibrücken Rose Garden, Germany, June 18, 2024.
Love is still the greatest weapon we have in the face of fear. It is still the antidote to all that afflcts us. No, opposing hatred isn’t hateful. Opposing hatred is how we embody love.
— John Pavlovitz, Worth Fighting For, p. 61
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, May 29, 2026
Remember that we are all on a journey and that the great thing about the universal love of Christ is that one doesn’t have to believe in it to experience it.
— Derek Ryan Kubilus, Holy Hell, p. 165
Photo: Karlstalschlucht, Germany, June 17, 2024