Whenever I allow anything but tenderness and compassion to dictate my response to life--be it self-righteous anger, moralizing, defensiveness, the pressing need to change others...I am alienated from my true self. My identity as a child of God becomes ambiguous,...
If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life's light to be determined by the darkness around me.
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum--even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking...
I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.______________________Gender-neutral paraphrase: I shall allow no person to belittle my soul by making me hate that person.
You either get bitter or you get better. It's that simple. You either take what has been dealt to you and allow it to make you a better person, or you allow it to tear you down. The choice does not belong to fate; it belongs to you.
The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace--bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one...
The "interior castle" of the human soul, as Teresa of Avila called it, has many rooms, and they are slowly occupied by God, allowing us time and room to grow. from The Divine Conspiracy
When Jesus was taken to be executed on the cross, 11 of the 12 men abandoned him, but the women stayed. When Jesus’ body was buried, the women were the first ones at his grave. When Jesus rose from the dead, the men were hiding, so the women announced his...
I’m mindful that for many of us, we have heard a lot of “no’s” in our lifetimes. Especially from people who think they are speaking for or defending God. Whether implicitly or explicitly, we’ve heard things like:"No, you’re not supposed to be asking questions like...
We American Christians will always be tempted to allow our own freedom, liberty, rights, and comfort to dictate how we exercise loving our neighbor. Jesus will keep asking us to allow the love of neighbor to dictate how we exercise our own freedom, liberty, rights,...