Wiser and Stronger Each Day

Beauty, Core Value, Growth, Healing, Redemption, Relationships, Truth 0

As you choose your path and how you will use your time in the present, you are actively creating an increasingly more satisfying future. You are also dissolving the imprint and impact of any verbal abuse you’ve heard. Any negative definition of who you are by anyone in any time or place has no meaning or reality. While you may have been the target, like a drive-by shooting, the comments were not your fault.

You are infinitely more deserving of love and care than any negative comments would say. They are simply little synapses that flew out of someone’s mind. They are less meaningful than the chirping of a bird. Knowing this you are wiser and stronger each day. Knowing this you can choose to do what is best and right for your highest self this week and in the weeks to come.

— Patricia Evans, Victory Over Verbal Abuse, p. 176

Civility, Dignity, and Respect

Growth, Healing, Letting Go, Relationships 0

Each of us has a different story. Not everyone needs to leave her partner. We don’t want to abandon people who need help. Your answer might not be to get out — only you know what’s right in your situation. And my purpose isn’t to demonize people who are abusive. They’re wounded and hurting in their own way. But please hear this: until someone is healthy enough to treat you with civility, dignity, and respect, that person isn’t healthy enough to be in your life.

— Christi Paul, Love Isn’t Supposed to Hurt, p. 255

True Strength

Growth, Letting Go 0

People often think holding on is what makes you strong, but sometimes it’s letting go. I was committed to releasing all that haunted me from this relationship. I wanted to learn from it, yes, but I was no longer willing to be chained to the memories that made me feel inadequate, insecure, and fearful.

— Christi Paul, Love Isn’t Supposed to Hurt, p. 159

Nothing Heroic

Growth, Letting Go, Relationships 0

If his partner confronts his verbal battering, if she recognizes it for what it is, if she asks for change and he refuses, if his attitude is, as one abuser put it, “I can say anything I want!” the partner may realize that he can say anything he wants, however, she may also realize that there is nothing heroic about staying around to hear it.

— Patricia Evans, The Verbally Abusive Relationship, p. 34

A Tiny Scrap of Time

God, Growth 0

From deep in the tradition, from The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century text from an unnamed English monk: “You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God.”

The words slap. Busyness is not much of an excuse if it only takes a minute or two to move toward God.

But the monk’s words console, too. For, of time and person, it seems that scraps are all I have to bring forward. That my ways of coming to God these days are all scraps.

— Lauren F. Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, p. 108

Serving God

Faith, God, Growth, Guidance 0

I believe serving God means being true to who He made you to be. It means allowing yourself to feel and be cognizant of the God-given desires stirring inside you. He isn’t going to call you to be a doctor if the sight of blood makes you queasy. He isn’t going to ask you to step onto a stage and sing if you’re tone deaf and prone to stage fright. It’s true that God may put us in uncomfortable positions sometimes. But His purpose in those times is for us to grow, not for us to fail.

— Christi Paul, Love Isn’t Supposed to Hurt, p. 90-91

Go Deeper

Acceptance, Growth, Life, Writing 0

When I coach students through essay writing, I invariably give the most able the same direction: go deeper, go deeper. In each iteration, reveal more, of who you truly are, of what you really think. That’s the hallmark of aging, too, that we learn to go deeper, in our friendships, in our family life, in our reflections on how we live and how we face the future. The reason we develop an equanimity about our lives and ourselves is that we have gone deep into what has real meaning.

— Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, p. 149

Me, Too

Acceptance, Growth, Humor, Life, Trials 0

The last few years have afforded me much experience in Coping with the Crappy Parts of Life referenced in the title of this book. However, it must be said that the Crap, plentiful as it has admittedly been, is overshadowed still by the Amazing, the Humbling, the Gratifying, and the Nifty. My prayer for us all is that we’re always able to pay more attention to those things in our lives and laugh our way around the Crap.

— Jill Conner Browne, Fat Is the New 30: The Sweet Potato Queens’ Guide to Coping with (the crappy parts of) Life, p. vii