Leah

“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

“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

“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

“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