I have so many things to work on, and so many ways that I fail. But that's what grace is all about. and I constantly wake up every morning trying to get better, trying to improve, trying to walk closer to God.

Often in our blindness, we take on our problems as identities. While divorce, depression, and single parenthood are significant human experiences, they are not identities. Our work is not our identity, though it is an important part of how God intends us to live. For too many of us, our sense of identity is more rooted in our performance than it is in God's grace.

Jesus is pointing to an internal reality of grace that expresses itself in observable changes in individuals and their relationships.

God is not working for our comfort and ease; he is working on our growth. At the very moment we are tempted to question his faithfulness, he is fulfilling his redemptive promises to us. After all, it's not like there are only some people who really need to change. Change is the norm for everyone, and God is always at work to complete this process in us.

No one ever said that conflict would be fun! But the Christian life is not always fun. That is not the most important thing to God. He is committed to something much bigger. His kingdom plan involves a total restoration of what he has made. He will settle for nothing less in his creation than to see that all things ultimately bring him glory.

If you choose to face conflict head on, it is full of risks and the potential for great hurt, but it can also be redemptive.

while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I think I have become.

it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be.

To live in happiness, you must know some unhappiness in life.

Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry? asked the duchess after a pause. Especially when one has been wounded by it, answered Lord Henry.

I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists.

It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded.