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“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

Forgiving Ourselves

George 0 Comments

From Pilgrim Heart:

… Lewis Smedes observes: “We do not have to be bad persons to do bad things. If only bad people did bad things to other people we would live in a pretty good world. We hurt people by our bungling as much as we do by our vices.” Ironically, our very decency – our desire to be “good people” – can compound our capacity to hurt others. Semdes observes shrewdly, “the more decent we are the more acutely we feel our pain for the unfair hurts we caused. Our pain becomes our hate. The pain we cause other people becomes the hate we feel for ourselves. For having done them wrong. We judge, we convict, and sentence ourselves. Mostly in secret.

Since “none is righteous, no, not one.” healing comes when we recognize that we are not outside the set of sinners, that we have failed time and time again, and will fail again – yet God’s grace is sufficient, even for us.

Hanging On

George 1 Comment

As we were driving down I75 Saturday at about 75 mph, I noticed this honey bee hanging on to the outside of my side window. The wind was whipping him furiously but he clung for all he was worth. It was amazing that he could attach himself to the slick glass surface and not be swept away.

It occurred to me that there are people like that bee; whose lives are such that the only thing they can do is just hang on.

Revealing (addendum)

George 0 Comments

I found this web posting by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to be particularly revealing in thinking about what may have lead to his extremism.

“I have no one to speak too [sic],” read a posting from January 2005, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was attending boarding school. “No one to consult, no one to support me and I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do. And then I think this loneliness leads me to other problems.”