Cheyenne

“Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man - there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!"; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

“Following Jesus is not a three-step formula: be with him, become like him, and so on. But there is a sequence. It is not a program but a progression. First, you come and be with Jesus; gradually you start to become like him; eventually, it's like you can't help it - you begin to do the kinds of things he did in the world. We see this progression in the stories of the original disciples: They spent months or possibly years just following him around Israel and sitting at his feet. Very slowly they began to change, and eventually, he "sent them out" to preach.”
― John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did

“it may be said unequivocally that whenever anyone is in extremis (whether it is a marital crisis, an economic crisis, a political crisis, or a health crisis), their chances of survival are far greater when their horizons are formed of projected images from their own imagination rather than being limited by what they can actually see.”
― Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix