“The beginning is always today” (Mary Wollstonecraft).

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“No matter where life takes you, the place that you stand at any moment is holy ground. Love hard, and love wide and love long and you will find the goodness in it” (Susan Vreeland).

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“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world” (Miyamoto Musashi).

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“Only by first disposing ourselves to the joy of the Spirit that is ever on offer can we resist the crippling anxiety that otherwise cramps all our attempts at mission and witness. This doesn’t mean, of course, that our anxiety will go away completely . . . rather, we just mustn’t let it “stick” on any particular concern (“be anxious for nothing,” that is, in particular). As our greatest Afro-American spiritual guide of the 20^th century, Howard Thurman, puts it in one of his meditations: “I must take a positive attitude toward the [very] thing that is the source of my disturbance. [For] I recognize that I am never alone … God is with me. He is present in the midst of my anxiety, as insight, as courage, as confidence. … [Whereas, in contrast, as Thurman goes on] Worry is against life. It is anti-vitality and anti-God” (Deep is the Hunger, 196, 197) (Sarah Coakley).

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“The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable” (Sean Illing).

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“The way we learn to respond to pain and suffering is to press into it. Can we sit with it long enough to listen to what is wants to say? What is it trying to teach us? Can we listen to that ache in our lower back or to those cloudy thoughts that keep circling our mind? Because the beginning of all real healing, Henri Nouwen says, is solidarity with the pain. And this is the truth we keep bumping into into: pain does not define us – it refines us. If we can respond with the right intention, if we can sit with it long enough, if we can steward it, if we can let it do the work it wants to, then it will become a refining experience. But if we stifle pain and suffering, if we stuff all of the anger and despair down deep, then affliction will not refine us – it will define us” (Jonathan R. Bailey).

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“In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

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Lord,  ”
plunge me deep into a sense of sadness
at the pain of my sisters and brothers….
that I may learn again to cry as a child
until my tears baptize me
into a person who touches with care
those I now touch in prayer…. ”
( Ted Loder)

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“Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give because He would give the best, and man will not take it” (George MacDonald).  We must “have a capacity to receive or even omnipotence can’t give” (C.S Lewis.)  Both of these men are quoted by Jonathan R. Bailey in “The Eternal Journey.”

“Discovering more joy does not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreaks without being broken” (Desmond Tutu).

Philosopher, theologian, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman encouraged us in this way: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”…