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religion is about having the right answers, and some of their answers are right... but i am about the process that takes you to the living answer... it will change you from the inside. there are a lot of smart people who are able to say a lot of right things from their brain because they have been told what the right answers are, but they don't know me at all.
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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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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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The enemy of a writer is not controversy but obscurity.
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Somehow the pain, the losses, the hurt, the bad, God is able to transform these into something they could have never been, icons and monuments of grace and love. It is the deep mystery how wounds and scars can become precious, or a ravaging and terrifying cross the essential symbol of relentless affection.” “Is it worth it?” whispered Tony. “Wrong question, son. There is no ‘it.’ The question is and has always been, ‘Are you worth it?’ and the answer is and always, ‘Yes!’
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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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Forgiveness in no way requires that you trust the one you forgive.
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This life is only the anteroom of a greater reality to come.
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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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True love never forces.
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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.
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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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There is only one race ... and it is human!
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You need boundaries... Even in our material creations, boundaries mark the most beautiful of places, between the ocean and the shore, between the mountains and the plains, where the canyon meets the river.
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For me, everything is about Jesus and Father and the Holy Spirit, and relationships, and life is an adventure of faith lived one day at a time. Any aspirations, visions and dreams died a long time ago and I have absolutely no interest in resurrecting them (they would stink by now anyway). I have finally figured out that I have nothing to lose by living a life of faith. I know more joy every minute of every day than seems appropriate, but I love the wastefulness of my Father's grace and presence. For me, everything in my life that matters, is perfect!
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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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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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I often find that getting head issues out of the way first makes the heart stuff easier to work on later.
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In some sense every parent does love their children. But some parents are too broken to love them well& others are barely able to love them at all.
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Healing is as incremental and mysterious as the damage ... what took time, takes time.
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I'm not an actual author but an accidental one.
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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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Just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn't mean I orchestrate the tragedies. Don't ever assume that my using something means I caused it or that I need it to accomplish my purposes. That will only lead you to false notions about me. Grace doesn't depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors.
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Truth will set you free. And Truth has a name.