Ella McKinlay

“To paint a picture of a dream life can be more appealing than an average reality and it is exciting and flattering to be in this bubble. But you can’t live in a painting. Real life takes sustained effort, slow progress and compromise.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Instant

“Forgiveness may be rejected by some as a weakness that denies the seriousness of wrongdoing. But Christian forgiveness does not say that the thing that happened to us didn’t hurt, it wasn’t wrong, or it didn’t matter. Forgiveness means that the incident did hurt, it was wrong and it does matter. Since every human being has been made in the image of God, our suffering matters profoundly. But we have the power to forgive...”
― Amy Orr-Ewing, Lead Like the Real You: Wisdom for Women on Finding Your Voice, Pursuing God's Calling, and Leading with Courage

“Spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized to the menial status of producers, and performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries. But there is far more to us than our usefulness and our reputation, where we’ve been and who we know; there is the unique, irreproducible, eternal, image-of-God me. A vigorous assertion of personal dignity is foundation to spirituality.

(Eat This Book)”
― Eugene Peterson

“And presently in the door stands the carpenter of Nazareth, and his mother and twelve more forby that have a smell of fish and seaweed and limpets on them from their trade, all known faces. Yet none guessed that here was the Incarnate Word (had they not bargained with him for cradles and chairs and roofbeams?).
(A Treading of Grapes)”
― George Mackay Brown, A Time To Keep and Other Stories