Stop making excuses for other people.
Stop making excuses for ourselves.
While it is our goal to develop compassion and achieve forgiveness, acceptance, and love, it is also our goal to accept reality and hold people accountable for their behavior. We can also hold ourselves accountable for our own behavior, and, at the same time, have compassion and understanding for ourselves.
— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go, p. 260
One problem with the word work is that it has come to be equated with drudgery, and is considered degrading. Now some work is drudgery, though it is not always degrading. Vacuuming the house or scrubbing out the refrigerator is drudgery for me, though I find it in no way degrading. And that it is drudgery is lack in me. I enjoy the results and so I should enjoy producing the results. I suspect that it is not the work itself which is the problem, but that it is taking me from other work, such as whatever manuscript I am currently working on. Drudgery is not what work is meant to be. Our work should be our play. If we watch a child at play for a few minutes, “seriously” at play, we see that all his energies are concentrated on it. He is working very hard at it. And that is how the artist works, although the artist may be conscious of discipline while the child simply experiences it.
— Madeleine L’Engle, Sold Into Egypt, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 235-236
Rejoice in the abundance of being able to awaken each morning and experience a new day. Be glad to be alive, to be healthy, to have friends, to be creative, to be a living example of the joy of living. Live your highest awareness. Enjoy your transformational process.
— Louise L. Hay, You Can Heal Your Life, p. 121
Happy women know that happiness is not the art of building a trouble-free life but rather the art of responding well when trouble strikes.
— Dan Baker, PhD, and Cathy Greenberg, PhD, What Happy Women Know, p. 236
Could it be that our lives actually make sense, every part — the good and the bad? Those deep yearnings that catch us by surprise when we hear a certain song on the radio, or watch our children when they aren’t aware of being watched, are telling us something that is truer about life than the Message of the Arrows. It seems too good to be true, which ought to raise even deeper suspicions that it is true. As Chesterton recounts in Orthodoxy, he “had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. . . . I had always felt life first as a story; and if there is a story there is a storyteller.”
— Brent Curtis and John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 44-45
If I told anybody what I sensed might be happening here, they’d laugh.
So let them laugh. Finding God in the ordinary is a way of seeing the world. It’s a willingness to suspect God when no other fingerprints match. When we encounter the sublime, terrible, inexplicable, we can stop silent in our tracks and whisper the words of Jacob as he awoke from his ladder dream: “Surely the Lord was in this place and I did not know it.” Or we can shrug it off as a weird coincidence.
— David Anderson, Breakfast Epiphanies, p. 153
Are you beginning to see now how essential joy is?
Because we live in a world at war. Because the enemy is relentless. Because we are “hard pressed on every side” (2 Corinthians 4:8). For these very reasons we need joy. Lots and lots of joy. Bucketfuls. Wagonloads. Joy can counter the effect of all this unrelenting other stuff. Without it we’ll get drained from the battle, sucked dry. We won’t have anything to draw upon. No inner reserves. We’ll waste away. Throw in the towel. Or we’ll fall into an addiction because we are absolutely starved for joy.
— John Eldredge, Walking With God, p. 114
The deepest convictions of our heart are formed by stories and reside there in the images and emotions of story. . . .
Life is not a list of propositions, it is a series of dramatic scenes. As Eugene Peterson said, “We live in narrative, we live in story. Existence has a story shape to it. We have a beginning and an end, we have a plot, we have characters.” Story is the language of the heart. Our souls speak not in the naked facts of mathematics or the abstract propositions of systematic theology; they speak the images and emotions of story. Contrast your enthusiasm for studying a textbook with the offer to go to a movie, read a novel, or listen to the stories of someone else’s life. Elie Wiesel suggests that “God created man because he loves stories.” So if we’re going to find the answer to the riddle of the earth — and of our own existence — we’ll find it in story.
— Brent Curtis and John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 38-40
Many of us think our most meaningful work has to do with minding other people’s business. Why is it so hard to let other people have their own journey? Why do we persist in interfering in other people’s lives, especially when we reap so few benefits? . . .
How sad that we perceive our own well-being as so tied to the decisions, even occasional whims, of others. But we do it, again and again, and our lives are never better for it, at least in the long run. In the short run, trying to help a loved one live his or her life may seem like the right thing to do — it may even be engaging for awhile — but taking charge of our own lives is as much work as any one of us needs to experience. The work of someone else’s life belongs to that person and God.
— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 11-12
But consider this: What if you knew it would all turn out well, whatever you are facing? What if Romans 8:28 really were more than a cliche? What if it was a certainty, a Spirit-certified life preserver, an unsinkable objective truth, infinitely buoyant, able to keep your head above water even when your ship is going down?
What if it really worked? What if it always worked? What if there were no problems beyond its reach?
— Robert J. Morgan, The Promise: How God Works All Things Together For Good, p. 3