Melissa

“It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“Often the cynic is wise toward reality but a simpleton toward redemption. The cynic offers thick and nuanced description of the swamps and the Challenger Deep but has little more than trite or formulaic expressions for beauty. Preachers must learn to describe something more than sin if they hope to preach redemption for the bogs of a post-everything world. To say rightly but solely that sin and misery saturate reality is to flirt with simplism.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture

“Against insurmountable obstacles and without a clue as to the outcome, the trusting heart says, 'Abba, I surrender my will and my life to you without any reservation and with boundless confidence, for you are my loving Father.”
― Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God

“grace leads us to reflect Christ’s holiness, but grace also motivates and enables us to reflect his mercy for the poor, his care for his creation, his zeal for justice, his delight in beauty, his love of the unlovely, his dignifying all kinds of work that apply his gifts, his treasuring of chastity outside marriage, his blessing of fidelity in marriage, his tenderness toward “the least of these,” and his love for the lost who have not yet found their home in him.”
― Zack Eswine, Preaching to a Post-Everything World: Crafting Biblical Sermons That Connect with Our Culture