All earth's full rivers can not fillThe sea that drinking thirsteth still.
Many of us are confessional giants but ethical midgets.
Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest.
Sabbath's golden rule: Cease from what is necessary. Embrace that which gives life.
The examen is a form of personal inventory. At day’s end, spend time in prayerful reflection on your day: your comings and goings, routines and disruptions, work and play, discoveries and disappointments. Think about who you met, or missed. Think about your moments of aloneness. In all, ask two questions: when was I most alive, most present, most filled and fulfilled today? And when was I most taxed, stressed, distracted, depleted today? A simpler, and more spiritually focused, version of those questions: when did I feel closest to God, and when farthest?
And then God gave me insight: this was winter. It would end, in time, but not by my own doing. My responsibility was simply to know the season, and match my actions and inactions to it. It was to learn the slow hard discipline of waiting. It was my season to believe in spite of-to believe in the absence of evidence or emotion, when there's nothing, no bud, no color, no light, no birdsong, to validate belief. It was my time to walk without sight.
God gave us laughter, I think, as a balm to wash the wounds of our own blunders, as a splint to mend the bones we break in our rashness or vanity.
There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.
You have within you right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.
A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.
Whatever's lost, it first was won.