Leah

“Sin is any Christian’s response to pain, poverty, and weakness that assumes they are individual problems to solve rather than places to patiently embody the solidarity of Jesus.”
― K.J. Ramsey, This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers

“Living with long-term suffering in American culture feels like being off-key. Suffering quiets and slows, but our culture prefers a crescendo.”
― K.J. Ramsey, This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers

“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

“Learning to try softer won’t automatically erase the pain of shame, anxiety, or trauma. It won’t make people love you differently. It will not take away the wounds already inflicted. It won’t give you a different childhood. But it just might change how you go through pain. And by now you know that the way in which you move through hardship matters greatly. It can predict whether something becomes integrated into your experience and loses its intensity or builds in power to the point that you feel it might overwhelm”
― 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