Ask yourself what you would do if you had an unlimited supply of both courage and hope. Now begin answering that question with action. Take one step today — then repeat, repeat, repeat.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 153
Photo: Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, March 29, 2024
I don’t believe our suffering is a premeditated test that forces us to find meaning, but I believe that pain is a present opportunity to choose: a sacred space where we get to decide who we will be and what we will believe and how we will respond. As people of faith, we get up when we fall because we are a people of hope, we accept the descent as an invitation to rise again. The spiritual journey — like the human experience — is not a level, linear path where pitfalls are uniform and where growth is predictable and progress comfortable. It is a messy, meandering, awkward path of stops and starts. It is made of both the falling and the getting back up — and the former is often far easier than the latter.
— John Pavlovitz, Rise: An Authentic Lenten Devotional, p. 1-2
Photo: Sunrise, South Riding, Virginia, March 23, 2022
Christ Crucified is all the hidden, private, tragic pain of history made public and given over to God. Christ Resurrected is all suffering received, loved, and transformed by an all-caring God. How else could we have any kind of cosmic hope? How else would we not die of sadness for what humanity has done to itself and what we have done to one another?
The cross is the standing statement of what we do to one another and to ourselves. The resurrection is the standing statement of what God does to us in return.
— Richard Rohr, Yes, And…, p. 76
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, March 12, 2022
We are being shepherded beyond our fears and needs to becoming our actual selves. This sucks and hurts some days, and I frequently do not want it or agree to it. But it persists, like water wearing through a boulder in the river. Hope springs from realizing we are loved, can love, and are love with skin on. Then we are unstoppable.
— Anne Lamott, Dusk Night Dawn, p. 190-191
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, March 30, 2021
Get back up. Dust yourself off. Remember that you’re playing the long game, and trust that over time, the good days will outnumber the bad. Do what you can to make this day more livable than yesterday.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 51
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, March 19, 2021
Trust that everything will be okay, but that doesn’t mean that everything will be restored. Start making yourself at home in your life as it is. Look around and look ahead.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 37
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, March 13, 2021
Stop expecting the worst: at least as many things could go right as could go wrong. Think of optimism as a way of sitting in the sun now, regardless of what the weather might be tomorrow or next week.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 27
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, February 7, 2021
Dreaming — impractical, foolish, impossible dreaming — gave us the very real civil rights movement. Dreaming gave us a South Africa freed from apartheid. Dreaming, as I see it, has saved me and many others from turning to despair and destruction in the darkest days, when evil seems to be winning. Dreams are love’s visions — the boundless faith that the world can be remade to look more like what God hoped for his creation.
— Bishop Michael Curry, Love Is the Way, p. 73
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, December 26, 2014
Revise the story you tell yourself about starting over. Consider not only how terrifying change can be but also how exhilarating. Consider this time an opportunity to make a new and improved life.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 12
Photo: American Library Association Annual Conference, Washington DC, June 22, 2019
Stop calling your heart broken; your heart works just fine. If you are feeling — love, anger, gratitude, grief — it is because your heart is doing its work. Let it.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 8
Photo: Leithöfe, Germany, November 1997