Guilt Hides Fear.

Acceptance, Forgiveness, Love, Relationships 0

Guilt is a place where we have made a monument to a mistake and left the path of life to worship at this monument. It has us withdraw and then withholds us from the people we love. We may feel we have made a mistake in relation to our partner and now feel guilty about it, but guilt not only reinforces the mistake, it starves our partner of the very love and nurturing they need. Forgiving ourselves cuts through the guilt and allows us to give the love and nurturing. Guilt keeps us stuck like the great superglue of life; the primary reason for our guilt is so we don’t have to move forward and face the next step. Our willingness to allow the next step to emerge cuts through fear in much the same way that forgiveness cuts through guilt.

— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 54

Acceptance

Acceptance, Truth 0

Acceptance has everything to do with simplicity, with sitting in the ordinary place, with bearing witness to the plain facts of our lives, with not just starting at the essential, but ending up there. Acceptance speaks in the gentlest voice. It commands only that we acknowledge what’s true.

— Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough, p. 127

Loving Who They Are

Acceptance, Love 0

Is this love or am I trying to change the person I love?

Have you tried to change your partner recently? How did you get on? Were they suitably appreciative? I imagine you didn’t get a thank-you note for your efforts. Have you tried to change your children? Were they receptive? Did it work this time? Children are willing learners, except when they don’t feel loved. Have you tried to change your parents again? After all, they’re getting older now and so they should be weaker and less able to resist your campaign. Has anyone tried to change you recently? How did you feel about that? Did you feel more loved? Are you feeling even more love for that person who wants to change you?

A common mistake in relationships is the belief that your love will change a person, eventually. You can’t love someone and want him or her to change. For a start, when you try to change people, they do not feel loved by you. If anything, they feel judged and rejected. Love does not seek to change people, because love does not find any fault in a person’s true essence. Love can help a person to grow and to bring out the best in him or her; but you will not see any of this if you do not love the person unconditionally in the first place. The paradox of love is that when you stop wanting each other to change, you are changed, and this change enables you to love each other more.

— Robert Holden, Loveability, p. 150-151

Expectations Ruin Experiences.

Acceptance, Growth 0

Expectations ruin experience because they place a demand on the situation to meet our needs. However, there is a good chance that our needs will not be met even if the situation lives up to our plan (our picture of how it should be). Our plan is a way of ritually killing all the inspiration of the event. Expectations are different from goals, which are good to have because they invite us forward and are much more productive and successful. If we miss the deadline or goal, we simply reset it, which facilitates moving forward. If we miss an expectation, we beat ourselves up and make ourselves feel bad, which do not facilitate moving forward.

— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 41.

Acceptance

Acceptance, Growth, Healing 0

Accept that their actions hurt you deeply. Accept that this experience taught you something you didn’t want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it’s going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.

— Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough, p. 83

A Family of Sinners

Acceptance, Faith, Forgiveness, God, Redemption 0

Long enshrined traditions around communion aside, there are always folks who fancy themselves bouncers to the heavenly banquet, charged with keeping the wrong people away from the table and out of the church. Evangelicalism in particular has seen a resurgence in border patrol Christianity in recent years, as alliances and coalitions formed around shared theological distinctives elevate secondary issues to primary ones and declare anyone who fails to conform to their strict set of beliefs and behaviors unfit for Christian fellowship. Committed to purifying the church of every errant thought, difference of opinion, or variation in practice, these self-appointed gatekeepers tie up heavy loads of legalistic rules and place them on weary people’s shoulders. They strain out the gnats in everyone else’s theology while swallowing their own camel-sized inconsistencies. They slam the door of the kingdom in people’s faces and tell them to come back when they are sober, back on their feet, Republican, Reformed, doubtless, submissive, straight.

But the gospel doesn’t need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out. It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, “Welcome! There’s bread and wine. Come eat with us and talk.” This isn’t a kingdom for the worthy; it’s a kingdom for the hungry.

— Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday, p. 149

Our Sorting System

Acceptance, Compassion 0

We tend to look down our noses at these ancient people with their religious codes regulating everything from the fibers in their clothing to the people they touched. But we have our own religious codes these days. We have our own scapegoats we cast from our communities and surround with Bible-wielding mobs. We have sins we delight in taking seriously, biblical instructions we interpret hyperliterally, issues we protect over-vigilantly because it helps us with out sorting system. It makes us feel righteous.

“Let’s not forget that Jesus told the woman to go and sin no more,” some like to say when they think the church is getting too soft on other people’s sin.

To this I am always tempted to respond: So how’s that working out for you? The sinning no more thing? Because it’s not going so well for me.

I think it’s safe to say we’ve missed the point when, of all the people in this account, we decide we’re the most like Jesus. I think it’s safe to say we’ve missed the point when we use his words to condemn and this story as a stone.

— Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday, p. 94

God of Forgiveness

Acceptance, Forgiveness, God 0

Where do so many of us get that feeling that if you’re not the best, you’re a failure? The God I believe in, the God I pray to, the God I turn to when I am at the point of losing faith in myself, is not a God who says, “I gave you one chance and you blew it. How can I ever trust you again?” The God I believe in says to me, “I have given you an incomparably valuable gift, the ability to know the difference between good and bad, between things that should be done and things that should not be done, the freedom no other creature has to use willpower to override temptation. And when you find that too hard to do, when you stumble and fall, when you are led astray by the pleasure of the moment rather than the long-term good, I will be there to pick you up, clean you off, and give you a fresh start, because I am a God of forgiveness, a God of second chances. Then when you are able to forgive yourself and to forgive people around you for not being perfect, I will recognize you as My child.”

— Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life, p. 100-101

Grace Gets Out of Hand

Acceptance, Community, Faith, God, Universalism 0

Philip got out of God’s way. He remembered that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out, but who it lets in. Nothing could prevent the eunuch from being baptized, for the mountains of obstruction had been plowed down, the rocky hills had been made smooth, and God had cleared a path. There was holy water everywhere.

Two thousand years later, John’s call remains a wilderness call, a cry from the margins. Because we religious types are really good at building walls and retreating to temples. We’re good at making mountains out of our ideologies, obstructions out of our theologies, and hills out of our screwed-up notions of who’s in and who’s out, who’s worthy and who’s unworthy. We’re good at getting in the way. Perhaps we’re afraid that if we move, God might use people and methods we don’t approve of, that rules will be broken and theologies questioned. Perhaps we’re already afraid that if we get out of the way, this grace thing might get out of hand.

Well, guess what? It already has.

— Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday, p. 39-40.