Amanda Friedman > Recent Status Updates

“In contrast to the dominant cultures embrace of self-fulfillment as the highest good, good faith Christians believe living under God's moral order leads to human and societal flourishing.”

But in the meantime, we will have to trust that the plan is ‘good’ regardless of how it appears. We suffer. We are heartbroken. We lose more than we can afford. I have met countless suffering people who find this belief in God's plan to be deeply comforting. In this moral universe, God allows our sorrows to instruct us before drawing us into a heaven with no tears.”

“In the second, more deterministic, account, God has a plan for our betterment, but not necessarily our happiness. Before the foundations of the earth, God foreordained our lives and directed our steps, and everything that may seem accidental or incidental, good or bad, will someday be revealed to be part of God's best hopes for us… cont…

“Prayer is the most important tool for your mission to the world. … What should you pray for? The Bible tells us to pray for opportunities to witness, for courage to speak up, for those who will believe, for the rapid spread of the message, and for more workers. Prayer makes you a partner with others around the world.”

“I guess all those hookups were like drugs to her … Mer had her reasons. Her parents were on the ropes. I got that. Where did Daddy's love for Mother get him? Still, was it good for my friend to give herself away like that?
Was it worth losing herself for the pleasure
— or the comfort? How would she ever gather up all those pieces? How would she find herself again?
How would I, if I took her advice?”

“If you serve like Jesus, you can expect to be criticized. The world, and even much of the church, does not understand what God values.”

“Many studies have revealed that the average person possesses from 500 to 700 different skills and abilities — far more than you realize.
For instance, your brain can store 100 trillion facts. Your mind can handle 15,000 decisions a second, as is the case when your digestive system is working. Your nose can smell up to 10,000 different odors. Your touch can detect an item 1/25,000th of an inch thick.”

“What matters is not the duration of your life, but the donation of it. Not how long you lived, but how you lived.”

“God will use your entire lifetime to prepare you for your role in eternity.”

“While we worry about how fast we grow, God is concerned about how strong we grow.”

“But a little sin is like being a little pregnant: It will eventually show itself.”

“In a time when so many people feel lost and dissatisfied with their lot, van der Kolk [author of The Body Keeps Score] comes along and offers secular absolution: It's not your fault. Trauma made you this way.”

Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, thinks this is a terrible practice. "Asking somebody ‘how are you feeling?' is inducing negative feelings. You shouldn't do
that. Never, never ever. Sit in the bus and look at the people opposite from you. They don't look happy. Happiness is not the emotion of the day."

“And in another paper Edith Weisskopf-Joelson expressed the hope that logotherapy ‘may help counteract certain unhealthy trends in the United States, where the incurable sufferer is given very little opportunity to be proud of his suffering and to consider it ennobling rather than degrading’ so that ‘he is not only unhappy, but also ashamed of being unhappy.’”

“According to logotherapy, we can discover the meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”

“One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”

“Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a ‘secondary rationalization’ of instinctual drives. This meaning is a unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.”

“We all said to each other in camp that there could be no earthly happiness which could compensate for all we had suffered. We were not hoping for happiness—it was not that which gave us courage and gave meaning to our suffering, our sacrifices and our dying. And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness.”

“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his sufferings as his task; his single and unique task.”

“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings” ~Dostoevski

These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement.

“The thought of women pilots made many Air Force men uncomfortable. If a mere woman could be a military pilot, maybe being a pilot wasn’t so special after all. It was an idea that took a while for senior Air Force leadership to embrace.”

1975- Uniforms might sound trivial, but they were a huge problem. Many interested women Air Force recruits didn’t join simply because they hated the uniform. Associated Press reporter Kelly Smith characterized the long jacket with padded shoulders as something that “looks like it walked out of a 1940 movie.” Interesting side note- the uniforms included skirts.

In 1934, Henderson barred women from the National Air Races because he couldn’t stomach the thought of a woman’s death.

“In 1934, Henderson had barred women from the race, saying, ‘Women have no more place in the National Air Races than on the automobile racetrack at Indianapolis.’ He didn’t have anything against women aviators, of course, but a year earlier twenty-three-year old Florence Klingensmith had died when a wing fell off her aircraft during a tight pylon turn at a race in Chicago. “Is it worth the price?”

[on Jacquelyn Cochran being the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic].. “ ‘She’ll belittle the rest of us who have been involved in this dangerous work. It’s for men.’ The opinion was really that if a woman could do the job, it wasn’t all that dangerous.”

Really good so far! I needed to return it to the library and hope to pick it up again!

“I think Richard Allen struggles to be alone,” Harshman said. “He does things for attention, and he gets upset when no one pays him attention.”

Pg. 315- Libby and Abby had suffered. They had been scared and tormented and humiliated. They were slaughtered and left to grow cold in the forest.

Pg. 319- Blair recalled passing by Libby and Abby as they headed toward the High Bridge. “They were just walking along and chatting with each other kind of quietly, kind of intimately,” she said.