The public perception that children’s librarians just sit around all day and read kids’ books may be a mistaken notion, but it does hint at one thing correctly. Our job is, not to put too fine a point on it, awesome.
— Elizabeth Bird, Children’s Literature Gems, p. 9
I think of picture books as stores of transferable potential energy.
— Martha V. Parravano, A Family of Readers, p. 4
When we’re beset by crisis, we also begin to recognize our own vulnerability. We see that in one realm or another we, ourselves, could use some assistance. And so, from the chalice of our own need, we start reaching out for help. That’s because once we’ve been taken apart by life, we are more humble, more open, more willing to both give and receive. We take bigger chances. We speak up. We reveal ourselves. We ask. We break down. We accept comfort. Words. A blanket. A meal. In time, we realize that something amazing has happened: that the more we reach out to others, the less lonely we feel ourselves. Somehow, even in the midst of our chaos, we are actually feeling loved. And the beautiful thing is that, the more love we need, suddenly the more we have to give.
Learning to love, loving more, that’s the bottom line of what a crisis is really all about. Through it, we are being asked to expand beyond the inordinate focus on ourselves — our obsession with what we need, want, and desire — to notice what we can share, how we can serve and be of help to one another. In short, we are being asked to enlarge the circle of our love. Of course, it’s not always easy to do this. It may be unfamiliar. But when we do engage, when we see and hear and respond to one another, life starts to seem less scary. The more you get and give help, the more it seems that you will actually make it through your own unbelievably painful passage. You sense that there really is a new future. Even in the heartbreaking present you realize that you’re not alone. Not only that, but instead of wearing out your biceps holding up a thousand-pound iron defense shield in front of your heart, you can let down your guard, let down your hair, give up your pride, have a good cry, and, in gratitude, receive the love that’s coming toward you.
— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 169-171
When arguing a philosophical point, you must leave your opponent room. Let him have a hand in the convincing of himself.
— George MacDonald, Wisdom to Live By, p. 106
To begin to forgive, it is good to forego for a while. That is, to take a break from thinking about the person or event for a while. It is not leaving something undone, but rather more like taking a vacation from it. This prevents us from being exhausted, allows us to strengthen in other ways, to have other happiness in our lives.
This is good practice for the final letting go that comes with forgiveness later on. Leave the situation, memory, issue as many times as you need to. The idea is not to overlook but to become agile and strong at detaching from the issue. To forego means to take up that weaving, that writing, to go to that ocean, to do some learning and loving that strengthens you, and to allow the issue to drop away for a time. This is right, good, and healing. The issues of past injury will bedevil a woman far less if she assures the wounded psyche that she will give it healing balms now and deal with the entire issue of who caused what injury later.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 401
So many of our catastrophes never come to pass. We project disaster and we do not allow for the working out of solutions that will happen as the days tick forward. We think that the worst will happen, only to find out, living through it, that what happens actually may be far closer to the best.
What I am talking about here is the silver lining. We may get tired of trying to look for one, but the truth is that one is always there. Inside every adversity lies opportunity. Take the dicey matter of finances. We always think that what we want is more money, when what we may really want is a gut-level assurance that God will provide — and this is something that often comes to us not in periods of abundance but in times of shortfall. It is when we do not know where the rent money is coming from that we notice the “miracle” that puts the cash into our hands. This is not to say that we need to manufacture misery in order for God to rescue us, merely to say that when we are rescued, we have a tendency to know the face of our rescuer and that face is God.
It is during hard times that we come to rely on God and that is a reliance that we can encourage in ourselves at all times. We do not need to be broke to ask God to help us with our money. Consider the flow of the natural world. Supply comes just where it is needed. We can ask God to be for us such a source of supply. We can ask God to make us attuned to our financial seasons, to cue us when we are free to spend and when we should curtail our spending. We can ask God to take away our fear of financial insecurity and to direct us as to where, from what corner, our prosperity might best come from.
We live in an abundant universe. Our share of that abundance comes to us as we rely upon God. Whenever we make our employer into our source — in other words, when we make our employer into God — we enter a period of fear, for our reliance is not squarely where it belongs. We are intended to rely upon God. God intends us good, and we are tutored by God daily in how that good can come to us. God moves in mysterious ways, but his ways become less mysterious as we try to draw closer to him. When we believe that we will be cared for, we fixate less upon exactly how.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 20-21
Perhaps forgiveness is really a confluence of these things. It is a growing empathy for the shared humanity of the offender, a growing understanding that the decision itself will also release us, and a growing enlightenment as to the power and need of forgiveness in the world and in our hearts.
Like any gift, forgiveness can bring joy to both the giver and the receiver, and the one who gives pays the highest price. But perhaps the extreme costliness of this particular gift imbues forgiveness, of all human actions, with the greatest potential to image forth the divine.
— Catherine Claire Larson, As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda, p. 92
Step out into the cool night air. Look at the stars. See how they shine. Know that it is okay for you to shine, too.
Who told you you had to hold back? Who told you your gifts, your talents, your beauty — your natural, beautiful, loving, delightful self — was wrong? Who told you not to be all you could be? Maybe, as some suggest, we’ve gotten too comfortable focusing on our flaws, our errors, our dark side. Perhaps it’s not our dark side we fear. Perhaps we’re really afraid of our gifts, our brilliance, our light.
Now is a time of light. It’s a time for us to shine. We’ve worked hard on ourselves, dealt with our issues, gone back to the past. We’ve learned our lessons well. The reasons to hold back and hide away are no longer there. Enjoy the fruits of your labors.
Be all you can be, and enjoy being that. Don’t hold back. Use your gifts with joy. Use your talents. Let your light shine for all the world to see.
— Melody Beattie, Journey to the Heart, p. 227
Consider this: Many people have trouble with forgiveness because they have been taught that it is a singular act to be completed in one sitting. That is not so. Forgiveness has many layers, many seasons. In our culture there is a notion that forgiveness is a 100 percent proposition. All or nothing. It is also taught that forgiveness means to overlook, to act as though a thing has not occurred. This is not true either.
A woman who can work up a good 95 percent forgiveness of someone or something tragic and damaging almost qualifies for beatification, if not sainthood. If she is 75 percent forgiving and 25 percent “I don’t know if I ever can forgive fully, and I don’t even know if I want to,” that is more the norm. But 60 percent forgiveness accompanied by 40 percent “I don’t know, and I’m not sure, and I’m still working on it,” is definitely fine. A level of 50 percent or less forgiveness qualifies for work-in-progress status. Less than 10 percent? You’ve either just begun or you’re not really trying yet.
But, in any case, once you’ve reached a bit more than halfway, the rest will come in time, usually in small increments. The important part of forgiveness is to begin and to continue. The finishing of it all is a life work. You have the rest of your life to work at the lesser percentage. Truly, if we could understand all, all could be forgiven. But for most people it takes a long time in the alchemical bath to come to this. It is all right. We have the healer, so we have the patience to see it through.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 399-400
In order to work with God, we must assume that God is willing to work with us. To do that, we must assume that God can start right where we are and not at some imaginary place we have to get to in order to meet him. God is not waiting to rendezvous with us once we have earned the right to his attention. God is waiting for us right now, just where we are.
Very often when we think about what we would like to have happen in our lives, we cast ourselves very far forward and out of the day we are in. No wonder everything seems so impossible and so difficult. We cast ourselves far into the future where we stand alone and buffeted, wondering where God is.
God works in the day that we actually have going on. God’s miracles are miniature daily miracles. They are miracles of evolution and miracles of progress. They are the small miracles that add up to large miracles. They are tiny right steps that lead us in the right direction. If we want to find God, we need first to find ourselves. That is where God is. Right with us.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 19