William P. Young Quotes
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I have moments that aren't too bad, but there's always something I'm struggling with, or feeling guilty about. I just figured I needed to try harder, but I find it difficult to sustain that motivation.
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The intricacy and the inherent beautiful fragility of the human soul is such that it is uniquely damaged and only God knows how to heal it, and it's going to take time.
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You cannot heal yourself. You cannot heal anybody else. We're designed to do this in community because we were created inside community for community by community.
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Submission is not about authority and it is not obedience; it is all about relationships of love and respect.
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This life is only the anteroom of a greater reality to come.
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Perhaps there is supranatural: reason beyond the normal definitions of fact or data-based logic; something that only makes sense if you can see a bigger picture of reality. Maybe that is where faith fits in.
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Healing is as incremental and mysterious as the damage ... what took time, takes time.
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Forgiveness is first for you, the forgiver...to release you from something that will eat you alive; that will destroy your joy and your ability to love fully and openly. Do you think this man cares about the pain and torment you have gone through? If anything, he feeds on that knowledge. Don't you want to cut that off? And in doing so, you'll release him from a burden that he carries whether he knows it or not--acknowledges it or not.
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It grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainly out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse.
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When we three spoke ourselves into human existences the Son of God, we became fully human. We also chose to embrace all the limitation that this entailed. Even though we have always been present in this created universe, we now became flesh and blood. It would be like this bird (a jay), whose nature it is to fly, choosing to only walk and remain grounded. He doesn't stop being a bird, but it does alter his experience of life significantly.
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Does that mean," asked Mack, "that all roads will lead to you?" "Not at all," smiled Jesus..."Most roads don't lead anywhere. What it does mean is that I will travel any road to find you.
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The enemy of a writer is not controversy but obscurity.
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I don't see the Father pouring out his wrath on the Son. I see the human race pouring out their wrath on the Son. So I see the only hope for the entire cosmos is what the Son chooses to accept, crawling upon the instrument of our greatest wrath. He met us at the deepest, darkest place.
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If you and I are friends, there is an expectancy that exists within our relationship. When we see each other or are apart, there is an expectancy of being together, of laughing and talking. The expectancy has no concrete definition; it is alive and dynamic and everything that emerges from our being together is a unique gift shared by no one else.
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Truth will set you free. And Truth has a name.
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I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming.
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Why do children love to hide and seek? Ask any person who has a passion to explore and discover and create. The choice to hide so many wonders from you is an act of love that is a gift inside the process of life.
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It's always been you know, religion that has been the primary impediment to actual relationship with God, because it creates a mythology about performance -- that you can perform your way into the appeasement of the deity. And you know, when you're born inside the cultural framework that I was, and you're born inside the religious traditions that I was, that becomes your understanding of spirituality: That it's about trying to please God. So, it's really not about God at all; it's about our ability to perform according to whatever the expectations are.
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...humans are not defined by their limitations, but by the intentions that I have for them; not by what they seem to be, but by everything it means to be created in my image.
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City and country -- each has its own beauty and its own pain. Some of the smallness of small towns -- cattiness, everybody knowing everybody's business -- that can be challenging. And cities can be challenging, because no one can connect except electronically.
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There is only one race ... and it is human!
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Part of my journey is to say that the soul of the human being must be a massively intricate, wonderful creation that God has a respect for in ways that we do not and that leaves a huge amount of space to go explore.
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Love is not the limitation; love is the flying.
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I think that most creative fiction involves the transformational process, whether it is Dickens or Dostoyevsky and the writer in some sense is expressing their own journey through such a wilderness.