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
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
She was right. There is always an answer to despair, and that is the promise of beauty waiting in the future. I know it is coming because I have seen and felt beauty in the past. Stacks of apricots in Rome; raccoon footprints in snow; piles of oyster shells bleached white over winter; lime green leaves of spring; burnt orange leaves of fall; Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher; the old stone walls of Connecticut winding around my yard; Venice at dusk, rose-colored from sky and sea: memories of beauty, sometimes experienced alone and sometimes shared.
— Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, p. 43
We don’t often know why things have happened the way they have in our lives. What we do know is that we were hurt, and part of that hurt is toward Jesus, because in our hearts we believe he let it happen. Again, this is not the time for sifting theological nuances, but this is why it is so important for you to look at the world the way Jesus did — as a vicious battle with evil. When you understand you have an enemy that has hated your guts ever since you were a child, it will help you not to blame this stuff on God. Anyhow, the facts are it happened, we are hurt that it happened, and part of us believes Jesus should have done something about it and didn’t. That is why we need to “forgive” him. We do so in order that this part of us can draw near him again, and receive his love.
Perhaps part of the fruit of that restoration will be that Jesus will then be able to explain to us why things happened the way they did. This is often the case. But whether we receive this or not, we know we need Jesus far more than we need understanding. And so we forgive — meaning, we release the offense we feel towards him.
— John Eldredge, Beautiful Outlaw, p. 164-165
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
I need to put forward more encouraging terms for my students than the negative popular terminology struggling and reluctant. Where is the hope in thses terms? I prefer to use positive language to identify the readers in my classes. Peeking into my classroom, I see sixty different readers with individual reading preferences and abilities, but I consistently recognize three trends: developing readers, dormant readers, and underground readers.
— Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer, p. 24
One thing I have learned over time is that if we cling to our feelings of anger, or worse, if we fan the flames of hatred, we are the ones who suffer. The person with whom we are angry may be affected for a moment or two, but no matter how much we rant and rave they go on with their lives. We are left with the fire burning inside. We lose sleep. We can’t even enjoy a book, a movie, or a hot fudge sundae. As the Buddha said, “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
— Allan Lokos, Patience, p. 27
I know this is not the current version of what is psychologically “correct,” because we all seem to think we need nothing but unconditional love. Any law, correction, rule, or limitation is another word for conditional love. It is interesting to me that very clear passages describing both God’s conditional love and also God’s unconditional love are found in the same Scriptures, like Deuteronomy and John’s Gospel. The only real biblical promise is that unconditional love will have the last word!
— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, p. 33
The medium does matter. It matters greatly. The experience of reading words on a networked computer, whether it’s a PC, an iPhone, or a Kindle, is very different from the experience of reading those same words in a book. As a technology, a book focuses our attention, isolates us from the myriad distractions that fill our everyday lives. A networked computer does precisely the opposite. It is designed to scatter our attention. It doesn’t shield us from environmental distractions; it adds to them. The words on a computer screen exist in a welter of conflicting stimuli.
— Nicholas Carr, “The Bookless Library,” in Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, edited by John Brockman
But bear in mind that healing is above all a learning experience, and one of its biggest lessons is that life is characterized by impermanence and flux. If you can learn to accept change with equanimity, you will have mastered a lot more than just an illness.
— Caroline Myss, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, p. 171