I don't get to shoot anybody. That kind of sucks.
I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will make sense only in reverse.
The rubber hits the road when we try to show grace to a person most unlike us, even someone morally offensive.
We in the church have humility and contrition to offer the world, not a formula for success. Almost alone in our success-oriented society, we admit that we have failed, are failing, and always will fail.
Eugene Peterson points out that "the root meaning in Hebrew of salvation is to be broad, to become spacious, to enlarge. It carries the sense of deliverance from an existence that has become compressed, confined and cramped. " God wants to set free, to make it possible for us to live open and loving lives with God and our neighbors. "I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free," wrote the psalmist.
We tend to think, 'Life should be fair because God is fair. ' But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life- by expecting constant good health for example- then I set myself up for crashing disappointment.
The world says you gain your life by getting more and more and more and more, but Jesus says, 'No, that leads to death. You get it back by giving it away and when you give it away you get it back. '
One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism.
I'm half-Italian and half-Polish. So I'm always putting a hit out on myself.
She taught me what's important, and what isn't. And I've never forgotten. And that's what mothers do, I say.
[T]he commitment of time, money and man power necessary for a capital case is enormous and it takes from other cases. But I think what bothers me most is that it offers to the families of the victims and the survivors a false sense of closure.