Allison Bailey > Recent Status Updates

“Living under law in marriage makes us naturally gravitate toward divorce. After all, we are sinners and are constantly breaking the law of God in our hearts and relationships. The law provides no ability or power for true repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. The basis for love, peace, and unity in marriage is not the law but the grace of God in Jesus Christ.“

If sympathy for the world’s wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, if love for those around us is not expanded, if gratitude for what is good does not flame up, if insight is not deepened, if commitment to what is important is not strengthened, if aching for a new day is not intensified, if hope is weakened and faith diminished, if from the experience of death comes nothing good, death has won. Then death, be proud

“Faith is a footbridge that you don’t know will hold you up over the chasm until you’re forced to walk out onto it.”

“Sometimes I think that happiness is over for me. I look at photos of the past and immediately comes the thought: that's when we were still happy. But I can still laugh, so I guess that isn't quite it. Perhaps what's over is happiness as the fundamental tone of my existence. Now sorrow is that.
Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea.”

Elements of the gospel which I had always thought would console did not. They did something else, something important, but not that. It did not console me to be reminded of the hope of resurrection. If I had forgotten that hope, then it would have brought light into my life to be reminded of it. But I did not think of death as a bottomless pit. I did not grieve as one who has no hope. Yet Eric is gone, here and now

“THE TEARS … streamed down, and I let them flow as freely as they would, making of them a pillow for my heart. On them it rested.” —AUGUSTINE, Confessions IX, 12

“But why celebrate stoic tearlessness? Why insist on never outwarding the inward when that inward is bleeding? Does enduring while crying not require as much strength as never crying? Must we always mask our suffering? May we not sometimes allow people to see and enter it? I mean, may men not do this?”

“Each death is as unique as each life. Each has its own stamp. Inscape. The tree in Hopkin’s garden had an inscape, but so did the felling of the tree. And one child’s death differs from another not in the intensity of the pain it causes but in the quality. To see a young life wither and die is as painful as to see it snapped off.”

“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.”

- Excerpt from The Peace of Wild Things

“The truth preserved by lying becomes a lie.”

If your past repeats itself in some way, this is where I want you to start: Look at what your God is like. He is faithful… Always & forever. And from the secure place of knowing that this is who he is..receive his mercies and make good on them. If you have sinned in an all-too-familiar way, you can confess and repent. If you have been hurt in an all-too-familiar way, you can cry out for comfort from your Comforter.

“It would be easy to think we are just failures or damaged goods because of what we did or what was done to us. But if we dwell there, then it is as if God's grace to us lacks power. God gave his Son to give us new life. And if we hold on to that truth, receive it, and believe it, then our lament goes where it is supposed to go: we are grateful for what the Lord has done in our lives. “

“That brings us back to your story. Will you believe that Christ has authority to tell your story? Perhaps it’s easy to believe an abstract notion that ‘God is in charge.’… But let’s get more personal. Will you believe that Christ has-and should have-all authority in your life because of who he is and what he has done for you?”

Laments in Scripture "share a common structure and pattern," writes Christina Fox. "Nearly all the laments move from the negative to positive, from sorrow to joy, and from fear to trust." A lament includes three critical movements: crying out to God, asking for help, and responding in trust and praise.

Shelley inviting Keats to stay with him as he recovered his health. I love his perspective on caring for his rival!

“Indeed Shelley, always generous in his judgement, perhaps because he was condemned as harshly by his own contemporaries as Keats had been, wrote: ‘I am aware indeed that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure.’”

After considering all that has been said so far in this chapter about the seriousness and beauty of the marriage covenant, we may be tempted to grit our teeth and press into marriage with greater strength and resolve. It is quite important that we do no such thing. The sacredness and awesomeness of the marriage covenant should first and foremost humble our hearts and drive us to God for His merciful aid.

“As creatures, we tend to reason from creation to the character of God, rather than from the character of God to creation.”

“The result of evil is always some type of suffering.”

“Learning how to cope with not getting everything done is as important as getting more done”

I like the perspective of seeking to keep roles centered, not balance. To keep them centered means to have certain roles with more weight. Sometimes, other roles are just not a priority because the most important role needs more attention for a season.

A husband and wife forsake all other lovers, just as Christ and the church forsake all other lovers. A husband commits his life to the true good of his wife, just as Christ gave His life for the church. The father of the bride gives his daughter to her husband, just as the Father gives. the church to His Son. A husband and wife become one flesh, just as Christ and His bride are one spirit.

Managers do things right, leaders do the right thing.

After watching the movies for the first time during Covid, finally listening to the books for the first time. Finally.

“Too often, churches are prone to platform leaders because this opportunity will be good for a leader's growth. While that is fine in some settings, in a counseling ministry, you only platform leaders who are ready to facilitate the growth of others. Leaders who are not ready to fill their counseling role will inadvertently but inevitably hurt the participants in that ministry.”

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since Thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.

Bitter-Sweet by George Herbert

If he says, Let not your hearts be troubled, it is not because he doesn't understand how troubled our hearts actually are, or doesn't feel that trouble too. On the contrary, it is because he feels and knows it only too well that he wants to heal it for us. It is not his will that death should do this to us or that our hearts should always be troubled, for he has come not only to share the trouble but to deal with it

You know too well this trouble in our hearts,
Your heart is troubled for us, feels it too,
You share with us in time that shears and parts
To draw us out of time and into you.
I go that you might come to where I am
Your word comes home to us and brings us home.

From “Let Not Your Hearts be Troubled” by Malcolm Guite

If we have ever felt, as the poet does in the first stanza (Our Prayers Break on God), that God and his heaven are on some distant shore where the first heave and surge of our grief can only break in tiny wavelets, then the second stanza brings us to the gospel truth that God is close, indeed closer to our pain than we are, that he suffers under the hammer blows of our troubles and our gnawing grief gnaws at him too.

“Open our clenched fists Heaven, to receive The touch of mercy, mercy in the depths.
Open your wound in us, the wound that heals...”

Earth by Malcolm Guite

“I am not mad: too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity…”

- King John - Constance’s Speech by William Shakespeare. On grief’s overwhelming realities.