He picked up one of Lorna's roses and set it in my lap. Here. I picked it up and smelled it. He poked me in the shoulder. See what I mean? Thorns don't stop you from sniffing. Or putting them in a vase on the kitchen table. You work around them.... Cause the rose is worth it... Think what you'd miss.

You take the bad with the good, Rise up through it. Live in the mist of it. It's the bad that lets you know ho good the good really is. Don't let the bad leave you thinking like there ain't any good. There is, and lots of it, too.

When you suffer and lose, that does not mean you are being disobedient to God. In fact, it might mean you're right in the center of His will. The path of obedience is often marked by times of suffering and loss.

Hope doesn't require a massive chain where heavy links of logic hold it together. A thin wire will do...just strong enough to get us through the night until the winds die down.

Sound advice comes from veterans of pain.

Life is difficult. That blunt, three-word statement is an accurate ap praisal of our existence on this planet.

Every achievement worth remembering is stained with the blood of diligence and scarred by the wounds of disappointment

The struggle of our lives was not a sign that there was still life. If you stopped struggling, that's when you needed to be worried. The fight meant that God was helping you keep going one more day even if you didn't thik you coould make it.

And God has this funny way of stretching and changing and pushing us toward things we don't want to face. I don't think the past is something we deal with as much as it deals with us.

It's not faith to say that when something painful happens, when you lose and lose again and the hurt goes so deep that you don't think you can take another breath, it's all going to work out for good. Faith doesn't explain. It doesn't even need to know or expect a happy ending. That's not what we're promised. Faith is abandoning illusions. It rests in something bigger, something beyond us and our ability. And I suspect you know that now.

Good things can come from pain, he said. Not all of it is good, of course, but some of it. And the places it leads are good places, not bad. Never be afraid of the places pain will take you.

Every day was bad news and worse than the one before it, and that was all you could expect from life.