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."

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.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

To be kind is to respond with sensitivity and human warmth to the hopes and needs of others. Even the briefest touch of kindness can lighten a heavy heart. Kindness can change the lives of people.

And my Christianity, first and foremost, governed the way that I tried to deal with people.

My grandmother knew nothing about sports. She still didn't even when I went to the NBA. She never really cared too much about sports. She only cared about me being a good person.