Try to be a good sport, baby. Sharon feels as bad as you do. It's all right for you to be mad, but...try to be as good a sport as you can. I'll tell you. It's a run-of-the-mill shitty thing. Life is full of them. And it is ALWAYS feels better to be kind.

My parents, teachers, and the culture I grew up in showed me a drawer in which to stuff my merciful nature, because mercy made me look vulnerable and foolish, and it made me less productive. It was distracting to focus worried eyes on others instead of on homework, and on poor Dad, after all he had done for us, and on the prize of making the whole family look good.

All good teachers know that inside a remote or angry person is a soul, way deep down, capable of a full human life--a person with hope of a better story, who has allies, and can read... To me, teaching is a holy calling, especially with students less likely to succeed. It's the gift not only of not giving up on people, but of even figuring out where to begin.

Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgivable. Mercy brings us to the miracle of apology, given and accepted, to unashamed humility when we have erred or forgotten. Charge it to our heads and not our hearts, as the elders in black churches have long said.

Waiting isn't easy, which is precisely why it is so effective when engaging with other people.

The way we make things better is by caring enough about those we serve to imagine the story that they need to hear.

All spiritual things are to be treated with sacred dignity. Humility and meekness are in accordance with the life of Christ, but they are to be shown in a dignified way.

Wearing a scrap of colored cloth around your neck, even though it serves no useful purpose, but which answers to the name of "tie."

The Gospel teaches us what Jesus' kingdom requires of us... Reminds us that closeness and tenderness are the rules of life.

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.

The Greek word used to translate the Aramaic word for meekness, which Jesus used in the Prophetic Blessing, was the word used for an animal that had been tamed and brought under the control of the bit and reins of its master. Meekness is power under control!

A man must at times be hard as nails: willing to face up to the truth about himself, and about the woman he loves, refusing compromise when compromise is wrong. But he must also be tender. No weapon will breach the armor of a woman's resentment like tenderness.