Expect problems and eat them for breakfast.
Rather, God has commissioned us as agents of intervention in the midst of a hostile and broken world.
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. '
The Social Democrats have to listen to people who are attracted to the AfD party. That isn't a mistake at all. You can also win them back. Of course, there are a lot of angry voters who are ideologically charged. But there are also a lot of quieter voters who plan on voting AfD to send a message. We can never give up on them.
You can only go forward by making mistakes.
The riches of heaven, the honor which cometh from God only, and the pleasures at His right hand, the absence of all evil, the presence and enjoyment of all good, and this good enduring to eternity, never more to be taken from us, never more to be in any, the least degree, diminished, but forever increasing, these are the wreaths which form the contexture of that crown held forth to our hopes.
A prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick, over the period of only six hundred years, would not only free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune, but would lead to a recovery which today seems scarcely conceivable.