It turns out that welcome is solidarity. We're glad you're here, and we're with you. This whole project called you being alive, you finding joy? Well, we're in on that.

So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?

These days are among the hardest we will ever live through. The wind is blowing, but because we are together in this, we have hope. Most days. Maybe more than ever before in my lifetime, my friends and I are aware of our brokenness and the deep crazy, the desperation for light, hope, food, and medicine for poor. What helps is that we are not all crazy and hopeless on the same day. one of us remembers and reminds the rest of us that when it is really dark you can see the stars.

Twenty minutes later, my ski patrol woman did come back, rubbing her bare hands together. "How you doing?" she asked. At first the enthusiasm in her voice worried me, because she sounded as if we might now move on to calisthenics.

Empathy is at the heart of marketing People don't believe what you believe. They don't know what you know. They don't want what you want. It's true, but we'd rather not accept this. Sonder is defined as that moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours. Everyone has noise in their heads.

When you meet someone, you need to have a superpower.

What I think we as the church lack, though, is a place to talk about how things really are now. In our desire to be an inspiration to one another we often veil what is true, because what is true is not always inspirational. But hurting believers whose lives are in tatters often need real help. If we were able to put aside our need for approval long enough to be authentic, then, surely, we would be living as the church.

Much as we deplore our condition in life, nothing would make us more satisfied with it than the changing of places, for a few days, with our neighbors.

A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest blessings.

You would not ask someone with a broken arm to swim the English Channel, so you cannot demand that the broken to live as if they were whole.

War is not the only arena where peace is done to death. Wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages.

The French say that to part is to die a little. To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.