Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

You know, I was dealt a lot of bad hands.

Nope, he penned these words of worship while sitting on the cold-floor, cold-food, maddening reality of Roman confinement. House arrest. Guards at the door, preventing his escape. When he wrote this glorious sentence, he was under a sentence himself, probably for as much as two years. Locked up. Locked down. Imprisoned.

Fighting the low-level cloud cover that's blocking out what you're wanting to see break through into your life.

That in the midst of heartache so deep it was a physical pain, she was finding a deeper joy and contentment in life than she'd ever known.

Sometimes we have to find the courage to take off our shoes and feel it all. Even the bad stuff.

Life is a gift, however long it lasts. It's God's to give and take away as He sees fit. We go through life thinking we're entitled to our ninety, but we're not entitled to anything. All we can do is trust that He knows what He's doing. That He has a plan for all of us, and that no pain He allows in our life will go unused.

Everyone has been wounded. It is almost inevitable that our parents will wound us in some way. If we are not wounded by our parents, we may be wounded by the death or illness of a parent or sibling, by a bitter marriage or bitter divorce, or if our immediate family is close to idyllic, we might be wounded by some other adult who abuses us or peers who mock us. An unscarred childhood is possible but very rare.

We determine how much we will allow something to make us unhappy. That we can determine our emotional response to events is hard for many people to acknowledge. Most people think that events make them unhappy, that their happiness level is essentially dictated by what happens to them. But this is untrue.

instead of allowing the enormity of the world's sufferings to make me unhappy, I have allowed it to increase the depth of my gratitude for the blessed life that I have been allowed to lead. You can look at the amount of suffering in the world and become bitter (this world stinks), cynical (nothing matters, it's all just a roulette game), or hedonistic (with all this suffering, I'll rack up all the fun I can) — or you can be grateful for your blessings.

In all my studies of happiness, one of the most significant conclusions I have drawn is that there is little correlation between the circumstances of people's lives and how happy they are. A moment's reflection should make this obvious to anyone. We know people who have a relatively easy life and who are essentially unhappy, and we know people who have suffered a great deal but maintained a relatively high level of happiness.

Happiness is a battle to be waged and not a feeling to be awaited.