You stop pretending life is such fin or makes sense. It’s often messy and cruel and dull, and we do the best we can. It’s unfair, and jerks seem to win. But you fall in love with a few people.
I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak.
Sometimes love does not look like what you had in mind.
I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen.
The pain does grow less acute, but the insidious palace lie that we will get over crushing loses means that our emotional GPS can never find true north, as it is based on maps that no longer mention the most important places we have been to. page 40.
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
Some people have a thick skin and you don’t. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams.
Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.
Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it’s like they are holding the baby of you.
I’m human, you’re human, let me greet your humanness. Let’s be people together for a while.
Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.
You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.
To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.
Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.
You can either practice being right or practice being kind.
I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years, that there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow.
Laughter is carbonated holiness.
Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.