Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, decided to leave her clergy position in part because of the church’s failure to administer that grace: One thing that had always troubled me was the way peop...
As Dorothy Day put it, I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.
Andy Rooney, the late commentator on the 60 Minutes television show, once said, I’ve decided I’m against abortion. I think it’s murder. But I have a dilemma in that I much prefer the pro-choice to the...
Always, no matter the circumstances, we have the assurance of Immanuel, which simply means God with us.
All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as the sum of the world’s suffering, an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wo...
Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, Well isn’t that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I’ll figure out what we’re going to do...
A grace-full Christian is one who looks at the world through grace-tinted lenses.
A counselor, David Seamands, summed up his career this way: Many years ago I was driven to the conclusion that the two major causes of most emotional problems among evangelical Christians are th...
The promise of pleasures so alluring that we may devote our lives to their pursuit, and then the haunting realization that these pleasures ultimately do not satisfy.
Positioned myself. I once described the people I tend to hear from as borderlanders, those caught in a no-person’s-land between faith and disbelief. Some approach the church cautiously, attracted to J...
Grace is the only force in the universe powerful enough to break the chains that enslave generations.
[Jesus] invoked a different kind of power: love, not coercion.
What is faith, after all, but believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse
We respond to healing grace by giving it away.
We have not, it seems, the power to abstain from worship. Instead, we swallow the sweet poison, substituting lesser gods for God.
Today, if I had to answer the question Where is God when it hurts? in a single sentence, I would make that sentence another question: Where is the church when it hurts? We form the front line of God’s...
Those who observe suffering are tempted to reject God; those who experience it often cannot give up on God, their solace and their agony. The presence of so many in church on a wintry night proved his...
There is only one way for any of us to resolve the tension between the high ideals of the gospel and the grim reality of ourselves: to accept that we will never measure up, but that we do not have to....
The only effective antidote to the wickedness around us is to live differently from this moment forward.
The kingdom of suffering is a democracy, and we all stand in it or alongside it with nothing but our naked humanity.