Leah

“This is why the ability to think about personal growth, people issues, and relationships as a process matters a great deal. When people begin to understand that change happens in layers – and is rarely linear – it’s as if someone took a grueling weight off them. They stand a bit straighter. Often they become a touch kinder to themselves and others. It’s as if someone put a balm on their souls and gave them this message: “It takes as long as it takes. It’s okay to be unfinished. It’s absolutely normal to be imperfect. It doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong.”
― Aundi Kolber, Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode--and into a Life of Connection and Joy

“Jesus’ words to his disciples are just as true for us today. We will weep and mourn. We will have sorrow. And our sorrow will turn to joy. Today, in the tension of pain that persists, we are living the reality Jesus named. Here we find the descending, rising rhythm that creates our new life. As Henri Nouwen says, “It is the way in which pain can be embraced, not out of a desire to suffer, but in the knowledge that something new will be born in the pain.”4 In our longing for tension to be relieved, we cannot miss that Jesus said sorrow comes before joy. This is the church’s story: sorrow comes before the song.”
― K.J. Ramsey, This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers

“Trying softer isn’t about knowing or doing the right thing; it’s about being gentle with ourselves in the face of pain that is keeping us stuck. Because no matter how hard we try, we can’t hate or shame ourselves into change. Only love can move us toward true growth. This is the love given to us by a gentle, kind, compassionate, good God—and the love we are invited to give ourselves too. Kristin Neff, the foremost researcher in the field of self-compassion, points out that compassion is different from empathy in that empathy is feeling with someone else, whereas compassion means to suffer with someone and then allow ourselves to be moved by that pain so we are motivated into action.[”
― Aundi Kolber, Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode--and into a Life of Connection and Joy

“the greatest story ever told is of a God who so loved the world that he chose to suffer for it. We’ll see what we can’t see when we’re busy searching for the purpose in our pain or hustling hard to prove how valuable we are for God’s kingdom. Suffering has always been God’s means of rousing a sleeping world with his love.2”
― K.J. Ramsey, This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers