Shannon

“You are my beloved! I made you and everything you have ever been or are or will become is already approved. Nothing you can ever do will make me love you more, and nothing you can ever do will make me love you less. That is finished. So stop hiding, stop waiting, and come now! Just get up and dance with me!”
― Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior

“I’d never admit it to my husband and kids, but it’s my own body I’ll miss most of all. This body that danced and ate and swam and had sex and made babies. It’s amazing to think about it. This body actually made my children. It carried me through this world.” She put her hands down. “And I’m going to have to leave it. I don’t have a choice. And to think I spent all those years criticizing how it looked, and never noticing how good it felt. Until now when it never feels good.” Second”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“You know what I do all day long as I lie here?” she said. “I try to be loveful.” I asked her what she meant. “We shower so much love on babies and children,” she said. “But as we grow up, it stops. No one showers love on grown-ups. But I think we need more love as we get older, not less. Life gets harder, not easier, but we stop loving each other so much, just when we need love most. I—” Her voice caught in her throat, but she took a big breath and kept going. “I need more love now that I’m so old. I need love.” She lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes, out of breath. In another few seconds, she opened her eyes again. “One day, when I was lying here, I realized how old God is. He is so old. He must need so much love. People are always demanding so much from him, but who is there to shower him with love? So I thought that was something I could do. That’s what I do all day: I try to love God. I lie here and try to make my heart burst with so much love. I can lie here and love God and maybe it will help him.” She sighed heavily and her eyelids fluttered. She promptly fell asleep. I”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“I say it sometimes to my daughter, who feels things so deeply. “There’s always a solution, sweetheart. You just haven’t imagined it yet.” I don’t know why I say it, because it has never comforted her. “You always say that, but in this case, THERE IS NOT!” she replies. I guess I want it to seep in somewhere deep in her subconscious, so that someday, when she is up against something truly awful, when the rug is pulled out from under her, some part of her will remember: that there is always a solution, that suffering is not forever, that some meaning can be found in even the direst of situations. I”
― Kerry Egan, On Living