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“Trauma is not so much what happened to us, but what happened inside of us.”

Quoting Andrew Murray:

A true revival means nothing less than a revolution, casting out the spirit of worldliness and selfishness, and making God and His love triumph in the heart and life.

"As we forgive, we also seek reconciliation with others. But we make sure to forgive before we try to reconcile. It is tempting to rush to a solution, but forgiveness enables us to seek solutions that honor God and others. Without forgiving first, we seek solutions that will benefit us or just enable us to move on with unresolved issues looming in the background."

We don't love our neighbors so that they will know Jesus; we love our neighbors because we already love Jesus and trust him.

"We don't love our neighbors to convert them; we love our neighbors because we are converted."

When we focus on another person's skin, we miss the reality of our own sin. This is not about religion or church. This about you and me, black and white, individually acknowledging that we have done wrong. That we have judged others. That we have bias and prejudice in our hearts. It starts here.

When we reduce someone else's humanity to a single-story, we can for a moment feel superior. And this is actually the appeal of racism. It's a reduction of a race of people to a stereotype. That reduction makes some people feel more powerful, even though they aren't. Racism is inherently immature, a form of cowardice, often hiding anonymously within a group that chatters the same things.

Any entertainment that exalts the self inherently feeds pride, and pride is the biggest problem that leads to violence and death.

I'm frustrated because we have believed a lie that says we can listen to, watch, and read about violence, sex,and lawlessness and not expect it to desensitize us.

The solution to the problem of race in America will be found only by ordinary people, "good" people, looking inside themselves, being honest about the assumptions and biases that have formed, and beginning to change what's in their hearts.

"Our greatest enemy is lostness. Lostness is the terrible enemy that Jesus commissioned His followers to vanquish with the battle strategy that He spelled out for them in Matthew 28:18-20. He was addressing the same enemy when He plainly clarified His purpose in coming: I have come to seek and to save those who are lost."

This was an attitude that I would encounter often in China. Personal trust and respect for spirit maturity were often in direct proportion to the amount of suffering that had been endured for the faith.

"I was captivated by the thought: what if persecution is the normal, expected situation for a believer? And what if the persecution is, in fact, soil in which faith can grow? What if persecution can be, in fact, good soil?"

Afghans also helped me understand the teachings of Jesus more completely. The culture of Afghanistan today is much more similar to the first-century Judea of Jesus' day than my own Western culture is.

When two cultures come into contact, they're both changed, and sometimes those changes are good.

Some people believe that the government rules Afghanistan, but that's simply not true. On the street level, the mullahs rule.

We look at one another across nations, religions, and even tablecloths and assume that beneath our clothes and customs we are somehow all the same. We believe that if we just communicate, we'll understand one another and find our ground common. We don't realize that we look at one another through our own eyes, from our own frameworks and worldviews...The reality is, we see the world very differently.

He told me which group he fought with, and I saw a deep sadness in his eyes through the rearview mirror. I wondered what stories haunted his mind, but my ride had already come to an end. I walked away thinking, the victims and the victors in this land both suffer.

For many Westerns, the question of who God is and what He wants for and from us is simply not relevant. We are, after all, wealthy and busy. For Afghans, it may be the most important question of all.

To be conformed to the likeness of Christ and to share in God's holiness are equivalent expressions. That is the highest good to which the believer can aspire...All pain we experience is intended to move us closer to the goal of being holy as He is holy.