you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the "integration of the negative." Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus's revolutionary Good News, Paul's deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare lived out with such simple elegance.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the spiritual journey is this: wisdom and love do not come from success but from continuing failure.

Christians learn to submit to trials because Jesus told us that we must carry the cross with him. Buddhists do it because the Buddha very directly said that life is suffering, but the real goal is to choose skillful and necessary suffering over what is usually just resented and projected suffering. In that the Buddha was a spiritual genius, and we Christians could learn a lot from him and his mature followers.

The wounds to our ego are our teachers and must be welcomed. They must be paid attention to, not litigated.

Anne Wilson Schaef

Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified prepare the soul for glory.

Better to be in trouble with Christ, than in peace without him.

God is more interested in your character than your comfort. God is more interested in making your life holy than He is in making your life happy.

When God wants to make a mushroom, he does it overnight, but when He wants to make a giant oak, He takes a hundred years. Great souls are grown through struggles and storms and seasons of suffering. Be patient with the process.

The deepest level of worship is praising God inspite of pain, trusting Him during a trial, surrendering while suffering, and loving Him when He seems distant.