Reading enlarges my vision of the world; it helps me understand someone who is different from me. It makes me bigger on the inside. We tend to see the world from our own perspective; it is good to see it from the eyes of others. Good literature helps me understand who I am in relation to what others experience. Far from being an escape from reality, good literature is a window into reality.
— Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman’s Heart, p. 24-25
“This is going to take a while” is one of the earmarks of growing faith. Faith unfolds through time. We need faith over and over again, not just once in a great while. Faith must be our constant companion. God must be a partner for us, not merely a spiritual pinch hitter to be called in at the bottom of the ninth. By saying “This is going to take a while,” we begin to acknowledge that life is a process and that we are given what we need to undergo that process. “Not I but the Father doeth the works” begins to become our lived experience. We feel the hand of God acting not only on us but also through us. We begin to have confidence that God’s power will flow where it is needed, that we can ask to be tapped into that power and expect that our request for power will be honored.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 116
As I conducted my interviews, I realized that only one thing separated the men and women who felt a deep sense of love and belonging from the people who seem to be struggling for it. That one thing is the belief in their worthiness. It’s as simple and complicated as this: If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.
— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 23
I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep.
You may have heard of me.
— Kvothe, in The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
Some Christians believe and often repeat that all that matters is whether or not a person is going to heaven. Is that the message? Is that what life is about? Going somewhere else? If that’s the gospel, the good news — if what Jesus does is get people somewhere else — then the central message of the Christian faith has very little to do with this life other than getting you what you need for the next one. Which of course raises the question: Is that the best God can do?
— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 6
Good literature is words at their best, taking words out of the mundane and demonstrating their wonder. It’s all of a piece, this business of words and reading.
— Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman’s Heart, p. 24
“Now you are here where before you were there” — that is a good description of how God works with us. We are not often shoved into the limelight. More often we are edged forward; we are nudged and coaxed and encouraged until we take the step out of the shadows we have been balking at. Often we see a huge step and we say, “I cannot take that” and we are right. But what we can take are the many little steps that make up the one giant step. We can take each baby step because it is “only” a baby step and we do not let ourselves think too much about where such baby steps are leading us. Taken cumulatively, baby steps work just as well as giant steps at taking us where we want to go. In fact, they may work better, since they allow us to keep our equilibrium while taking them.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 106
This love compels us to question some of the dominant stories that are being told as the Jesus story. A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance of anything better. It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.
— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. viii
Let’s become more beautiful with age, attaining the stature of the Jungian crone. Let’s be wise and mature and queenly. Let’s allow our centers of power to shift with grace, from focus on physical expression to focus on spiritual strength. The game isn’t cruel except when played by the negative mind. In the life God has in mind for us, we grow more and more beautiful and know more and more joy. The longer we live, the more time we have to pursue the things that make life meaningful. Above all, let’s not be ashamed of age. How often I’ve heard it said about a woman, “She’s fifty. I’m telling you, she’s not a day under,” as though she had been caught in some crime. Youth is not a great prize, and age a sad afterthought. If anything, youth is the bud, and age is when we blossom.
— Marianne Williamson, A Woman’s Worth, p. 140
To make a man happy as a lark, might be to do him a grievous wrong: to make a man wake, rise, look up, and turn is worth the life and death of the Son of the Eternal.
— George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God, p. 57