“If the early church preached and practiced what I preach and practice, would there be a church today?” (Dallas Willard).

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“They [people in AA] also have slogans, which you can either dismiss as hopelessly simplistic or cling on to like driftwood in a stormy sea. One of them is “Let go and let God”—which is so easy to say and for people like me so far from easy to follow. Let go of the dark, which you wrap yourself in like a straitjacket, and let in the light. Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you—your children’s lives, the lives of your husband, your wife, your friends—because that is just what you are powerless to do. Remember that the lives of other people are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business because they all have God whether they use the word God or not. Even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought” (Frederick Buechner in Telling Secrets.)

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“Any amount of regret changes the past. No amount of anxiety changes the future. Any amount of gratitude changes the present” (Ann Voskamp).

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“Christmas means that there are no insignificant or pointless lives. It means that the events and choices of an average day can carry eternal significance. It means that a journey of meaning and purpose – a life of courage and generosity – can begin from whatever desolate place we find ourselves . . . . Even lives that feel relentlessly ordinary or hopeless-ly broken are vessels of divine purpose” (Michael Gerson, The Washington Post).

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“What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude” (Brene Brown).

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“I am beginning to now see how radically the character of my spiritual journey will change when I no longer think of God as hiding out and making it as difficult as possible for me to find him, but, instead, as the One who is looking for me while I am doing the hiding”(Henri Nouwen).

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“For if we genuinely love Him, we wake up inside Christ’s body

where all our body, all over it, every most hidden part of it, is realized in joy as Him, and He makes us, utterly real,

and everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged is in Him transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely and radiant in His light.  We awaken as the Beloved in every last part of our body” (Symeon the New Theologian – 9949-1022).”