Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand....
There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.
Once you experience being loved when you are unworthy, being forgiven when you did something wrong, that moves you into non-dual thinking. You move from what I call meritocracy, quid pro quo thinking, to the huge ocean of grace, where you stop counting or calculating.
The great lesson of Beauty and the Beast is: a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
The greatest thing we can do is let people know they are loved.
Hate is as all-absorbing as love, as irrational, and in its own way as satisfying. As lovers thrive on the presence of the beloved, haters revel in encounters with the one they hate. They confirm him in all his darkest suspicions. They add fuel to all his most burning...
Jesus was never "prone to wander" or "prone to leave the God he loved." He came to earth to settle that issue once and for all. He came to set us free, that we too might be transformed from "prone to wander" to "prone to love."
For Jesus, there are no countries to be conquered, no ideologies to be imposed, no people to be dominated. There are only children, women, and men to be loved.
They said that if I questioned a 6,000-year-old earth, I would question whether other parts of Scripture should be read scientifically and historically. They were right. I did. They said that if I entertained the hope that those without access to the gospel might...
Our culture insists in looking for things we can measure, signs of a life well lived through metrics like health, strength, and success, but maybe we, too, should start listening for new vital signs; beds surrounded by loved ones, legacies of kindness and generosity,...