There is no simple theological answer to pain; the answer is a relationship with God in the midst of pain. Those who need things in neat little black-and-white packages cannot tolerate such a faith.
Mother Earth is not a machine.
In many contexts, until we let go of what is not good, we will never find something that is good. The lesson: good cannot begin until bad ends.
What reason, other than the fact that I want this to work, do I have for believing that tomorrow is going to be different from today?
Make the endings a normal occurrence and a normal part of business and life, instead of seeing it as a problem.
In the absence of real, objective reasons to think that more time is going to help, it is probably time for some type of necessary ending.
When parents teach children that setting boundaries or saying no is bad, they are teaching them that others can do with them as they wish.
Feelings signal our state of being. Feelings tell us how we are doing, what matters to us, what needs changing, what is going well, and what is going badly.
Edmund Burke, “All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
One of the worst things you can die with is potential. Die with failures before you die with potential.
Controllers can’t respect others’ limits. They resist taking responsibility for their own lives, so they need to control others.
Each spouse must take responsibility for the following things: Feelings Attitudes Behaviors Choices Limits Desires Thoughts Values Talents Love.
The bigger issue is that your character as a person works best when you are “integrated.” In my book Integrity, I talked about how the word integrity comes from the Latin word meaning “whole,” and how business and leadership work best when a person has an integrated or whole character. They are then running on all cylinders and are the same person on the job as they are at home. They are able to use all of their capacities in both places and accomplish their vision.
The other thing that often happens in the ending conversation is that the ender runs into resistance from the endee and loses the verbal joust. Being more adept at the conversational dance, the endee talks the ender out of the ending.
No real and deep change occurs outside of relationship and trust, for that is the place where the heart lives. People often say, “I know that in my head, not in my heart.” For the heart to know it, the heart must return to the vulnerable place where the rules were first written on it. Through this sort of vulnerability, it can learn new rules.
We are in a constant position of being loved.
It is one thing to have safety in relationship; it is quite another to be truly known and accepted in this relationship.
The Bible teaches two themes throughout: the first is that we are created in the image of God and that we have incredible value. The second is that we are sinful and broken. There is the ideal, and there is the real. Both are true, and both need to be reconciled into a grace-giving relationship with God and others.
Deep down inside, we all realize the difference between our ideal self, the imagined perfection, and our real self, the one that truly is. If these two battle each other, we will be in constant conflict. What we wish were true and what really is true will war with one another.
Just as there is good time and bad time, there is good endurance and bad endurance. When we suffer, is the true self growing or is the false self just enduring pain? If we are on God’s surgery table in grace-giving relationships with our real self, time spent suffering will produce completeness; we will grow up, and we will experience changes that heal.
Fear gets us in touch with our very real vulnerability, and it gets us in touch with our need for others and God. Many times people treat others very insensitively because they are warding off their fears of being vulnerable.