Let’s make the decision to joyfully accept all situations — the lines, the traffic jams, the downed computers, and the rest — as opportunities to include God in our lives, in that moment, and then wait for the change in perception that will assuredly come.
— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 14-15
When the deepest desire we feel within our hearts is for something other than God, a spirit of entitlement develops. We see ourselves as needing something we don’t have and we believe we should have. Justice is on our side. So we think. Prayer becomes demand when desire becomes our tyrant.
Soon we’re caught in the addictive cycle. Whatever brings satisfaction relieves pain for the moment, then creates deeper emptiness that, in turn, more rudely clamors for relief. We lose our power to choose. The will becomes a slave to whatever god makes us feel better. We die as persons while Satan chuckles.
— Larry Crabb, Shattered Dreams, p. 86
It is important to be gentle with and accepting of yourself throughout your relationship. You are just as flawed, misguided, and hurtful as your lover, and you both need a good dose of TLC. While the idea of self-forgiveness might be a “duh” to many of you, the point still needs to be made. Self-forgiveness enables you to move on with kindness after grieving your flaws and the ways you have hurt your lover. When you forgive yourself, you look for your good qualities, appreciate the love you offer, and accept with humility the harm you cause. You also change your story to reflect your positive intention and your effort to do the best you can with what you have to work with.
Self-forgiveness is not that different from forgiving your partner. . . .
Nobody is perfect, and everybody will make many mistakes. Some of us make mistakes that cause harm, and others make mistakes that only cause a mess. Because you and your partner are human beings, you will make mistakes, fail occasionally, and sometimes even harm other people. Your need to be perfect is an unenforceable rule, one that can never be met. Needing to never hurt your lover is an unenforceable rule. Demanding that you always be successful in all aspects of your relationship is an unenforceable rule. When you accept that you are human, you are able to offer forgiveness to yourself and remember that you have the resources at your disposal to improve yourself and help others.
— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 209-210, 215
Can you think of any need you have that would require more strength than God exercised to raise the dead?
— Beth Moore, Praying God’s Word Day by Day, p. 253
I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing. Forgiveness says, “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.” But excusing says “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it; you weren’t really to blame.” If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites….
A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in it [forgiveness], from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour. But that would not be forgiveness at all. Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it. That, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it.
— C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, quoted in A Year with C. S. Lewis, edited by Patricia S. Klein, p. 263-264
But a person with a shattered life . . . doesn’t first need Christ to forgive her or to forgive through her. Before anything else, she needs Christ to cradle her, to nurse her with the milk of divine love, to hold her in his arms like an inestimable gem, to sing her songs of gentle care and firm protection, and to restore her to herself as a beloved and treasured being.
And that’s what Christ does.
— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 206
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
All parents of teenagers are besieged with setting limits, negotiating guidelines, and generally looking out for the well-being of their children. This is hard work. Worse, if the above becomes the focus of your relationship with your teenager, you will not have the influence you desire. Quite simply, the stronger your connection, the more influence you have with your teenager. When you pay the same attention to your connection as you do to limits and guidelines, everything becomes easier and more effective. But it takes work and creativity to foster this connection, most of it yours….
In short, connections matter, and the best way to teach this to your teenager is through your connection to each other during these tough adolescent years. After all, one lesson you want your teenager to learn and carry forward into the rest of his or her life is that relationships and connections matter. People on their deathbeds don’t wish they had worked more; instead, most people wish they had loved more. This really means they wish they had learned to love and to stay connected when relationships became complicated and tough. And adolescence is about as tough as it gets, so staying connected now is the best training you will ever have or need.
— Michael Riera, PhD, Staying Connected to Your Teenager, p. 260
God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found. What I am called to is to enter into that joy. It is God’s joy, not the joy that the world offers. It is the joy that comes from seeing a child walk home amid all the destruction, devastation, and anguish of the world. . . .
I am not accustomed to rejoicing in things that are small, hidden, and scarcely noticed by the people around me. I am generally ready and prepared to receive bad news, to read about wars, violence, and crimes, and to witness conflict and disarray. I always expect my visitors to talk about their problems and pain, their setbacks and disappointments, their depressions and their anguish. Somehow I have become accustomed to living with sadness, and so have lost the eyes to see the joy and the ears to hear the gladness that belongs to God and which is to be found in the hidden corners of the world.
Henri J. M. Nouwen — The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 114-115