Needs make us think that we lack something that can only be fulfilled through a certain situation. They give us tunnel vision, so we limit the amount of response, fulfillment, or resolution that we can have in any situation.
Creativity is a way of looking at the world or any situation from an expansive viewpoint. It reaches out because it comes from our love for others.
— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 23
If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability. When we commit to showing up and risking falling, we are actually committing to falling. Daring is not saying, “I’m willing to risk failure.” Daring is saying, “I know I will eventually fail and I’m still all in.” Fortune may favor the bold, but so does failure.
— Brene Brown, Rising Strong, p. 5
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
Healthy dependency allows you to ask for help, to be open to inspiration, to cooperate with others, and not to try to do life by yourself. Unhealthy dependency arises when you feel unloveable and see others as the source of your love. This causes you to enroll your mother, your partner, or your children, for instance, into making you feel more loveable. They may not know it, but they have a contract of employment. You believe it’s their job to make you feel whole, secure, and connected to the world, to heal your wounds, and validate you. Inevitably, though, when you make someone your source of love, they will also be a source of pain. No one does a very good job making someone feel loveable, mostly because it’s an impossible task.
Robert Holden, Loveability, p. 146
The best quotes don’t speak to one particular truth, but rather to universal truths that resonate — across time, culture, gender, generation, and situation — in our own hears and minds. They guide, motivate, validate, challenge, and comfort us in our own lives. They reiterate what we’ve figured out and remind us how much there is yet to learn. Pithily and succinctly, they lift us momentarily out of the confused and conflicted human muddle. Most of all, they tell us we’re not alone. Their existence is proof that others have questioned, grappled with, and come to know the same truths we question and grapple with, too.
— Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough, p. xv
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
Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.
— Brene Brown, Rising Strong, p. 4