it comes to my struggles with feeling unglued.

One rejection after another did quite a number on my heart. And each new rejection didn't just add hurt; it multiplied the pain that was already there. That accumulation created a dark feeling of hopeless defeat.

Broken boards can't provide stability.

The voices of condemnation, shame, and rejection can come at you, but they don't have to reside in you. That's your miracle in the mess.

Brokenness is what must happen before God can put the pieces back together in the way He can shine through the best.

The resulting hurt of any form of rejection can linger and entangle us from moving forward if we don't put it behind us.

Today's rejections, big or subtle, are like stealth bombs that zing straight to my core, locating hurts from my past and making them agonizingly present all over again.

I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.

Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," and it seems nothing has changed.

The whole course of Christianity from the first ... is but one series of troubles and disorders. Every century is like every other, and to those who live in it seems worse than all times before it. The Church is ever ailing ... Religion seems ever expiring, schisms dominant, the light of truth dim, its adherents scattered. The cause of Christ is ever in its last agony.

People don't really know whether they are committed to something until they face adversity.

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good.