Gail

“Mary bears the unbearable. This is her witness as the God-bearer. We are called to do the same, to bear the unbearable, with and for each other. We have to trust that we do not bear the suffering alone. Listen to the truth Jesus speaks, in the midst of all pain: behold, we belong to one another.”
― Liz Tichenor, The Night Lake: A Young Priest Maps the Topography of Grief

“Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.” —Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World”
― Kate Bowler, The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days

“A leader who is invested in knowing, advocating, and striving will have difficulty embracing emergence. The leader who practices unknowing, attending, and surrender will rest more productively into the cycle.”
― Susan Beaumont, How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You're Going: Leading in a Liminal Season

“If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you're either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: "Can I believe it all again today?" No, better still, don't ask it till after you've read The New York Times, till after you've studied that daily record of the world's brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer's always Yes, then you probably don't know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you're human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that's choked with confession and tears and. . . great laughter.”
― Frederick Buechner