Amanda Tranmer

“It is only in the heat of pain and suffering, both mental and physical, that real human character is forged. One does not develop courage without facing danger, patience without trials, wisdom without heart- and brain-racking puzzles, endurance without suffering, or temperance and honesty without temptations. These are the very things we treasure most about people. Ask yourself if you would be willing to be devoid of all these virtues. If your answer is no, then don’t scorn the means of obtaining them. The gold of human character is dug from torturous mines, but its dung and dirt are quite easily come by. And it should come as no surprise to us that in our time—the time of the great flight from pain—such virtues as these are conspicuous only by their absence. I’m”
― Dallas Willard, The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus – Demonstrating Christianity Through a Transformed Life of Love and Humility

“Was it love of people?” I asked her. “Of course not,” she snapped sharply. “How can you love ignorant, brutish people whom you don’t even know? Can anyone love filth and squalor? Or lice and rats? Who can love aching weariness, and carry on working, in spite of it? One cannot love these things. One can only love God, and through His grace come to love His people.” I”
― Jennifer Worth, Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times

“Truth reveals reality, and reality can be described as what we humans run into when we are wrong, a collision in which we always lose. Being”
― Dallas Willard, The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus – Demonstrating Christianity Through a Transformed Life of Love and Humility

“Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. . . . We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them. . . . Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else [circumstances, for example], and, as we put it, he goes round and round in circles. That is the essence of worry. . . . That is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think.2 We’re”
― Dallas Willard, The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus – Demonstrating Christianity Through a Transformed Life of Love and Humility