Neither is Blameless
Make the assumption that neither of you is blameless. Ironically, this reduces the pressure to twist the truth in order to be “right.”
— Ellyn Bader, PhD, and Peter T. Pearson, PhD, Tell Me No Lies, p. 140
Books Confirm Your Own Opinion.
But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.
— The Queen, in The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett, p. 114
Regardless of Circumstances
Happy women know that they can have meaningful, fulfilling, and happy lives regardless of life’s circumstances.
— Dan Baker, PhD, and Cathy Greenberg, PhD, What Happy Women Know, p. 233
Love Changes Us.
I had this unoriginal thought as I walked out the door and toward my van: love changes us, makes us into people whom others then want to love. That’s why, to those of us without it, love is the voice asking, What else? What else? And to those of us who have had love and lost it or thrown it away, then love is the voice that leads us back to love, to see if it might still be ours or if we’ve lost it for good. For those of us who’ve lost it, love is also the thing that makes us speak in aphorisms about love, which is why we try to get love back, so we can stop speaking that way. Aphoristically, that is.
— Sam Pulsifer, in An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke
So Many Books
“Pass the time?” said the Queen. “Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.”
— The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett, p. 29
God Will Set All Things Straight.
We can be assured of this: God, who knows all and sees all, will set all things straight in the end. Even better, he will dry every tear. In the meantime he mysteriously takes our sorrows and uses them to heal the world.
— Richard J. Foster, Prayer, p. 223
Never Abandoned
I don’t know how it matters; I only know that it does, that when we suffer, God suffers, and he will never abandon the smallest fragment of his creation. . . . He will not give up on me, not now, not after my mortal death. He will not give up on any of us, until we have become what he meant us to be.
— Madeleine L’Engle, A Severed Wasp, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 158
Forgiveness and Repentance
Repentance is important, even indispensable, and it is indispensable because forgiveness is an event between people, not just an individual’s change of feelings, attitudes, or actions. Instead of being a condition of forgiveness, however, repentance is its necessary consequence.
If they imitate the forgiving God, forgivers will keep forgiving, whether the offenders repent or not. Forgivers’ forgiving is not conditioned by repentance. The offenders’ being forgiven, however, is conditioned by repentance — just as being given a box of chocolate is conditioned by receiving that box of chocolate. Without repentance, the forgivers will keep forgiving but the offenders will remain unforgiven, in that they are untouched by that forgiveness.
Why? Because they refuse to be forgiven. . . . Unrepentant offenders implicitly say: It’s wrong for you to forgive me; I’ve done you no wrong. Or more brazenly, they say: I don’t care if you forgive or not, because I don’t care whether I’ve wronged you or not. Mostly, however, they say: I am too ashamed of the wrongdoing I’ve committed to repent, too afraid of the consequences that may befall me. In all three cases, forgiveness is rejected. . . .
That it is difficult to repent genuinely will not come as a surprise to those who have pondered the gravity and power of human sin. One of sin’s most notable features is that it unfailingly refuses to acknowledge itself as sin. We usually not only refuse to admit the wrongdoing and to accept guilt, but seem neither to detest the sin committed nor feel very sorry about it. Instead, we hide our sin behind multiple walls of denial, cover-up, mitigating explanations, and claims to comparative innocence.
The accusations of others reinforce our propensity to hide sin. We usually do all we can to justify ourselves, and that reaction is understandable. We fear the consequences of sin. We may lose a good reputation or be punished. We cannot bear to face ourselves as wrongdoers. We fear that the integrity of our very selves might crumble under the weight of our offense. That’s why we are often able to repent only when we are assured that our guilt will be lifted and charges will not be pressed against us. In other words, we are able to genuinely repent only when forgiveness has first been extended to us. . . .
Forgiveness does not cause repentance, but it does help make repentance possible.
— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 183-186
Reading
Briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual, and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader, p. 21-22
Positive Intention
The good news is that as we connect to our positive intention, we begin to find forgiveness. Forgiveness is the compassion we experience as we remind ourselves that by driving a car — having a relationship — we run the risk of a breakdown. Forgiveness is the power we get as we assert that we have a deep well of resilience to draw upon. Forgiveness is the grace that helps us remember to look around while we’re on the side of the road and appreciate our beautiful surroundings and the people we love. To help forgiveness emerge, we can learn to see ourselves from the point of view of our positive intention, not primarily as a wounded or rejected lover.
— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 190