Quotes from Edward Welch

Notice how those who have medicated away their hardships with illegal drugs, alcohol, or sex can seem immature. They may look forty-five, but they have the character of an adolescent. Find a person who has weathered storms rather than avoided them and you will find someone who is wise.

Since the desires for power and control are in every heart, you don't have to look overseas for lawless brutality. It happens every day between parents and children, boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives. Where there is injustice, shame will be part of its fallout.

There is something about uncleanness that asks for blood.

What happens when people are raised on a steady diet of "You are great, you can do anything, you deserve it, you are the best, you can get what you want"? Sooner or later they find that they are not great, they can't do everything, they are not the best, and they can't control it all. Depression and denial are the only two options left.

You feel like an outcast. You don't belong. You feel naked. While everyone else is walking around with their clothes on, you feel exposed and vulnerable. You are seen, and what others see is not pretty. You feel unclean. Something is wrong with you. You are dirty. Even worse, you are contaminated. There is a difference between being a bit muddy and harboring a deadly, contagious virus.

Worriers are visionaries minus the optimism.

The first steps out of shame will be the hardest. These are the anti-denial steps in which we will put shame into words. You can't do battle with something nameless, and too often shame eludes accurate identification. So we will search for words that bring shame out into the open, where it can be seen and fought against.

If I can trust the word of a friend, why do I question the word of the God of the universe? Go figure. Sin is truly bizarre." [Running Scared, p. 111]

You never expected that God himself would, by his representatives, actually come close to unclean people and touch them. The Holy One is not human. The triune God is not human. Don't limit God's character by your expectations of what a decent human king might do. You expect God to reject; he accepts. You expect him to turn away; he turns toward.

Anger takes everything personally, as if everything is an intentional act to make your life miserable.

The fear of man is no respecter of persons. It might be called codependency by adults, peer pressure with teens, and shyness with children, but whatever it is called, it all betrays the same idolatrous heart.

We crave autonomy. Autonomy is closely linked to arrogance. They are both expressions of human pride, but autonomy suggests that we want to be separate from more than over. We want to establish the rules rather than submit to the lordship of the living God. This was the essence of Adam's original sin. We want to interpret the world according to our system of thought. We want to establish our own parallel universe, separate from God's.