The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. Inside this aging body is a heart still as curious, still as hungry, still as full of longing as it was in youth. I sit at the window and watch the world pass by, feeling like a stranger in a...
The novelist Pearl Buck argued that artists are people who tend to be extremely sensitive to any emotional input: "The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them, a touch is a blow, a sound is...
A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask the hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy...
Everything hurts,Our hearts shadowed and strange,Minds made muddied and mute.We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.And yet none of it is new;We knew it as home,As horror,As heritage.Even our childrenCannot be children,Cannot be. Everything hurts.It’s a hard time to be...
I have been asked hundreds of times in my life why God allows tragedy and suffering. I have to confess that I really do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction. I have to accept, by faith, that God is sovereign, and He is a God of love and mercy and...
If one reaches the point where understanding fails,this is not a tragedy; it is simply a reminderto stop thinking and start looking.Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all;perhaps we only need to wake up.
The ultimate tragedy is not the cruelty and oppression by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
Life's tragedy is we get old too soon and wise too late.
The tragedy of Christian history has been that we have so often assumed that ecstatic language is literally true and that the experience of God can be bound by human words.
A man was shipwrecked on an island where no one else lived. He laboriously gathered some material from the island and built himself a crude house. One day he was away from the house when he saw smoke rising from that direction. He rounded a bend and, to his horror,...