Before the truth 'sets you free', it tends to make you miserable.

Do not get rid of your hurts until you have learned all that they have to teach you.

If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If

It is the struggle with darkness and grief that educates the male soul.

Even inside an incarnational worldview, we grow by passing beyond some perfect order, through a usually painful and seemingly unnecessary disorder, to an enlightened reorder or "resurrection." This is the "pattern that connects" and solidifies our relationship with everything around us.

Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.

On a man's journey, everything has its place. Our failures, heartbreaks, defeats, and victories; our wounds, dreams, and passions; our stops and our starts-all have a place in our story, and all have a place in our transformation from shadow men to real men. Everything has meaning, and everything belongs.

Do not be shocked, but I suspect some priests' and ministers' moral failures are actually very helpful to their own "salvation" and necessary for their growing up.

I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling but also, more important, to show us how to fall and also how to learn from that very falling

True transcendence always includes the previous stages and does not dismiss them or punish them, as most reforms and revolutions have done in history. This is true reconciliation, healing or forgiveness and always characterizes mature believers. They afterward seem to thank God for the pain and the trial.   good

Three steps forward, two steps back.