Because we are continually growing in the Lord, preachers and lay people alike must be open to the Lord's correction.
Kids need to see that Jesus is the best thing that ever happened to us. And they need to know it can happen to them.
It seems we need someone to know us as we are - with all we have done - and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please.
But pain may be a gift to us. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift.
There is something truly restorative, finally comforting, in coming to the end of an illusion - a false hope.
I suppose in our contemporary lives, our cumulative e-mails might constitute a kind of diary: that informal, moment-by-moment description of life as it goes by. . As I think of those notes now - what I wrote, what I said - it seems to me they danced across the surface just as my grandmother's diaries did - Anais Nin she wasn't, and I wasn't, either. Who is? Not even Anais Nin.
I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy. . . that makes you unkind.
We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.
Now, two things happen. One is, people know people, whether that's on Facebook or Twitter. They feel closer to the event. Secondly, people see other people doing something about it.
There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain. . . Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.
Anger is a great force. If you control it, it can be transmuted into a power which can move the whole world.